I wake up at night thinking about Euripides' 'Hecuba.' That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people.
I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.
I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.
The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.
The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
I think in telling a good story there has to be ups and downs with any character, and you can't just have everything go swimmingly and you can't just have characters who are supposed to be in a romantic relationship just getting into an argument every episode.
The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony--periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.
I've always been interested in the Greek tragedies. A few years back, I re-read a translation of the 'The Oresteia,' and that stayed with me, and slowly this idea of using some of those old legends and plays to tell a new story about modern urban life began to form.
After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.
You see it in the stuff I've done at Laika: I've always tried to make movies that have an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth. That have a thinking brain and a strong beating heart at the centre of it.
It feels like we're all so familiar now with the traditional three-act structure that, actually, stories that are more complex, more naughty, that allow for disagreement and discussion, are more interesting to us.
