You have kids and you’re forced to remember that time actually extends. The world extends, policy extends, stakes extend past your own life.

Being a father teaches you very quickly that you are not the center of your own universe. That’s one of the gifts of having to wipe poop!

Parenting is the wildest adventure and vocation that can happen to a person. Every day is different and there is no static. So, you have to kind of surrender to the process, which is a hard thing to do for somebody like me who prefers to have order in my life.

There is nothing more important to me than my children and focusing on them. It’s the quality of time with my children, not the quantity of time that I’ve found to be important.

But there’s nothing like that quality of leading a decent, dignified life, meeting up with other people who have similar ideals, expressing kindness and love and curiosity and challenging and argument and the excitement of ideas. Ideas can be marvelous.

And into the darkness I said, “What happened?” and a woman’s voice said, “It was a car bomb,” and I collapsed into darkness again, but with a sense of euphoria. I’d survived.

Monday to Friday, very, very industriously from ten in the morning ’til about six in the evening, I just sat and wrote, and revised and revised, and wrote.

I would try to keep myself going by inventing games, and I would sing songs, a song beginning with “A,” “Always.” “Because,” “Charmaine,” “Daisy,” go through the alphabet. ... I would try to remember the states in the United States of America.

And I got stuck in my unconscious for years. I had trouble getting out of explaining, “When I walk, why does my left foot go in front of my right foot?” There was nothing that just happened. Everything had to be predetermined, explained.

I want to give little Oliver as much daddy as I can while I’ve got strength. I want to make a movie. I’ve got a very strong movie in my head.