Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
Andy Stasiuk was a newsman of the old school of front-page journalism - tough, knowledgeable, cynical, single-minded and fun. He covered the news as a happy warrior in an era of cutthroat editorial competition.
Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting.
People often talk about parachute journalism, but one of the skills that you get when you are a correspondent is the ability to look at facts fast and work out what the story is.
I really want to complete films in a shorter duration, but somehow it does not seem to happen.
Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.
When you're on set, and that clock is going, every second you spend doing something is a second you spend not doing something else. That's true of all of life, but it's very vivid on a film set because you're always managing that.
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.
Getting involved in a newsroom and seeing how it operated and the urgency of live television really got my attention.
Deadlines just aren't real to me until I'm staring one in the face.
I'm a reporter - if I don't interview someone, I don't have much to say, and I definitely can't just sit down and knock out 800 words on any subject you give me.
The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.
I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.
Louis Brandeis really inspired me to write this book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet]. It was a crazy deadline. The editor said I'd miss the hundredth anniversary unless I pumped the thing out in six months, because I'd been delaying and dilly dallying for so long. So he both inspired me to get up early and write.
The only thing I don't have is enough time.
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, 'Can you rewrite this episode before... 6 P.M.?' So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.
I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic.
But even writing the column for the 'Telegraph,' that idea of working to deadlines, which as an actor that's not something you have to do in the same way. It's excited me into wanting to do a bit more.
I take a certain pride in having maintained a reputation for fast copy throughout my newspaper career. Fast-breaking stories left my typewriter in a hurry. Not great literature, perhaps, but fast, and usually accurate.
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.
