In every way at every turn, the question we ask ourselves is not what can we do, but what should we do?.”

As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds. The writer’s secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind.

So far they are conforming to pattern, alas! I mean I am suffering from the usual delusion that the play was ready before we went into production. It happens every time. I give my publisher the finished text of the play so that it can be published not too long after the opening in London, but by the time the galleys arrive they’re hopelessly out-of-date because of all the changes I’ve made during rehearsals. This time I gave them Hapgood and told them that it was folly to pretend it would be unaltered, but I added, “I think it won’t be as bad as the others.” It turned out to be worse. Yesterday I realized that a chunk of information in the third scene ought to be in the second scene, and it’s like pulling out entrails: as in any surgery there’s blood. As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.

Screenwriting is more lawyering than writing.

In one month, two of my old prejudices were reversed. Two things that I was prejudiced against.

My mentor heard it and said, “Derek, you’re just not a singer. You really need to stop trying. Admit you’re a songwriter, and find a real singer.”

If you are a total atheist and believe in nothing, and you believe that when you die, there's no whatever spiritual realm that you just plop into the earth, well, then your personality is what lives on through recordings like this, through your writing and so that is your personality living after you have physically died. That is my favorite definition of the afterlife.

I have nothing else in the works. I'm spending a lot of time learning Chinese and a lot of time being with my boy who is a teenager now and wants a lot of my attention.

there was a year and a half after I sold my company where I felt adrift. I had a vague desire to slough off all responsibility. I had all the money now, so I had total freedom. Sold the company, I had nothing I had to do. I had nowhere I had to be.

The value of a coin toss is not seeing whether it lands on heads or tails. It’s noticing whether you are disappointed in the result or what you’re wishing for when it’s flipping