The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.

It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.

Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.

Making a film, I've learned, can be an exhausting process, due to the need for backing, distribution, etc.

I think that we are supernatural. We are unique. We're the only animals in the universe that we know of that actually have self-consciousness, a sense of time and our own mortality.

We are predators, whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment.