Anybody who sits down to write, and they think 'thriller,' maybe shouldn't be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking 'novel,' maybe 'thriller' way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story.

My son died from cancer. My granddaughter died from cancer. I have a lot of reasons to think that reality is not a friendly neighborhood. And the stories that I tell distract me, and if I do the job right, they distract people from things that are happening to them that they wish had never happened.

The thing with drama is you're allowed to invent people who are maybe slightly better than real people.

Usually when I write a script, I have in mind some real people that I'm writing about, who don't always act in the film afterward.

Actors are seen as celebrities, but they're just real people with families.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.