When you make a movie, a dramatization based on the real experience of a living subject, you cant airbrush that away into to a perfect movie arc.

They say crying makes the heart lighter

Keep your central character moving, discovering, learning.

I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.

One doesn’t question a miracle.

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.

For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.

Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.

There isnt a more important issue in the world than global warming. Even the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs crisis were a notional threat.

I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

If your paramount concern in life is to make sure everyone likes and approves of you, you’re going to find yourself running in circles for the rest of your life.

Until you get it that in reality you, and the enemy you hate, are identically and inseparably 'One', of a single make, you're one big silly mistake.

I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace an interlude during war.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true

Art should be on the side of humanity.

So one thing I want to say about life is don't be scared and don't hang back, and most of all, don't waste it.

Cycling, cycling forever bear, wolf, caribou. When had it all started, where will it end? We are all part of one, from such simple beginnings and yet all so different. Yet one. One and again.

God, though this life is but a wraith, Although we know not what we use, Although we grope with little faith, Give me the heart to fight and lose.

There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don't wish to do.