“In terms of identity, I think one has a sense of being roughly the same set of thoughts as one was yesterday. Of a continuum of observation. But you give yourself your own character by telling yourself stories, don’t you, really?”
… [Various childhood events] contributed to the framework of his writing, in which the need to understand the world is held in tension with the comic hopelessness of doing so.
… “I had a sharper sense of death in middle age than I now have. I think that’s common to all of us. When your parents die, when your father dies, when a friend or two dies, what you had known all along comes home; that this will happen to you too. When you get to be older, it is something that ceases to worry you so much somehow.”
… [W]hen we talk about the distinction between writing journalism and plays, Frayn suggests that all of it comes from the same place, from the pressing need to sense a shape and a pattern in the rush and surprise of experience.
“All journalists have to be acutely aware of that process, but we all are really. What do you tell your friends when you meet, what do you tell your wife when you get home at night? It’s all stories, something that will catch the interest.” …