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In all of the movies and films you see, people are always in crisis because that's what we watch. We watch them deal with crisis and resolve it.

The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do.

We have been crafted by disaster to push out to the utmost horizon to find out what's on the other side of it. That's in our nature. What's also in our nature is a profound love and connection to our children and our communities. Those two things are very much at conflict with one another at certain moments.

I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

Most people feel that they are the heroes of their own lives and that they're good people. So if they're in a crisis, they feel an understandable urge to set out their own version of events.

Successful people recognize crisis as a time for change - from lesser to greater, smaller to bigger.

People respond in accordance to how you relate to them. If you approach them on the basis of violence, that's how they'll react. But if you say, 'We want peace, we want stability,' we can then do a lot of things that will contribute towards the progress of our society.

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

In times of crisis, different people react in different ways. Some might try to escape. Others might attempt to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm in a safe haven.