People say to me, 'Oh, being a mother must make you a better actor,' and I think, 'Well, I never sleep, I have very little time to think about anything except when I'm actually there.' I wonder whether that makes me a better actor. I think it must on...
The problem with dragons is that everyone uses them. All the time. When that happens, they become commonplace. A lot of people think you can just throw them into a story and suddenly whatever you're writing is 28% cooler. But that doesn't work. All t...
Some bloke came up to me in Tesco a couple of years ago at 11:30 pm and said: 'Excuse me, would you mind telling my son here that you're Uncle Vernon?' I said: 'Get a grip. It's 11:30 at night - what's he doing out of bed? I'm not here to entertain p...
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thous...
Benjamin Button: Some nights, I'd have to sleep alone. I didn't mind, I would listen to the house breathin'. All those people sleepin'. I felt... safe.
Benjamin: It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.
Lesra: Why'd you do all that? Terry Swinton: 'Cause you were smart and funny. Sam Chaiton: And short. We figured it'd be good for you to spend a little time with some tall white people. Terry Swinton: Yeah, Absolutely.
Kiki: Jiji, I've decided not to leave this town. Maybe I can stay and find some other nice people who will like me and accept me for who I am.
Captain Miller: Back home, when I'd tell people what I do for a living, they'd think, "Well, yeah, that figures." But over here, it's a... a big mystery. So I guess I've changed some.
Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people. James Coughlin: ...Whose car are we gonna' take?
People be saying, 'Watch - when she gets some money, she's going to get a Gucci purse.' But I don't think that's my style. I like finding random stuff and random brands. Maybe one day when I'm sophisticated and older I might settle down and invest in...
I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly n...
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the re...
I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school te...
Obviously I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappe...
The BBC sports department when I was there was seriously to the right of Ghengis Khan, and if people think I am strange, they should have met some of the production staff I worked with. Margaret Thatcher and the Queen were the pin up girls for many o...
Some kids win the lottery at birth; far too many don't - and most people have a hard time catching up over the rest of their lives. Children raised in disadvantaged environments are not only much less likely to succeed in school or in society, but th...
I write about people who are usually damaged or neglected by society finding each other and forming relationships that are quite extraordinary and in some cases life-saving. I've had a few of those relationships, which I value highly.
I think that for all of the dangers of technology spreading, I think it is more dangerous in some ways that it doesn't. My simple reason for that is we've got 7 billion people on the planet, and we have these very serious problems, and I think we don...
I was really fascinated by some of the things happening with Anonymous, the hackers group. I don't necessarily agree with everything they've done, but I thought it was a really interesting use of technology and the fact that there's a whole group of ...
The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number o...
