For more than three years, I'd been part of a complex and frustrating dance as my nonfiction, fact-based material was translated from book to movie by scriptwriters whose visions, goals and sensibilities often were quite different from mine.


I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

'Pulp Fiction' was probably one of the first films I ever saw that really kind of took effect on me. I was about four years old - obviously wasn't supposed to be seeing that film; my sister kind of sneaked it out and we got to see it. She's older than me. That was something I always used to watch.

I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.