Quotes from David Hewson

Scripts are very different to books. They are blueprints for building, not the building.

Lympne Castle opens its doors to visitors during the summer only. It is privately owned, and more an interesting medieval manor than a castle.

Why do we use flash at all? Because photography is not the same as eyesight. We can see in low-light situations where cameras, dependent upon a physical process to record visual information, are half blind.

Flash turns up the optical volume so that whatever lies behind the lens - be it film or a digital sensor - is a little more receptive.

Scarborough never really began to live until the summer of 1964 when the Beatles played the Futurist Theatre, and no one in the audience, least of all me, heard anything but the screaming.

Low light demanded 'fast' film, usually ISO 400 or higher; the fastest available would be about ISO 1000. When the sun was bright, you would reach for ISO 64 to avoid the burned-out look of overexposure.

Flash photography can be horrible. In the hands of an expert who knows how to bounce all that searing bright light in the right direction, it may make an impossible picture workable.

To watch. To wait. To wonder at a world in chaos,' the girl said. 'And hope one day you fools might learn.

My life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. It means nothing.

Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?

Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more. I'll weep an ocean in my heart, if the world would give me time. But not now.

In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.

the end, it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.

It's so much easier to define crime than it is to put your finger on justice.

Perhaps," he continued, "this capacity for evil is in all of us, then, and it's largely down to fortune whether we encounter the circumstance that breathes life into it or not. Just as it's luck that determines when or if that faulty gene breaks and gives you cancer or Marfan or the physique of an Olympian.

A child was a brief and blissful interlude of responsibility, not a thing to be owned.

There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end.

His dad, dying in the hospital, had said something about pain. It stuck to you like flour. You thought you could wash it all away, out of your clothes, out of your hair. But some stray grain always persisted, slyly avoiding your well-meant attentions and the drugs the doctors had. Life was like that. The only thing to do, he said, was your best.

Dependence breeds neither cordiality nor respect. - Pg. 77

Humour was often attached to cruelty, it seemed, and cruelty troubled Pino Fratelli.

A husband betrayed was a cuckold. A woman treated the same way was a wife.

Rash acts may spur rash consequences.

The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.

Tragedy occurred outside normal time, everyday convention. It possessed a bewildering ability to fade and grow brighter simultaneously.