Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.

If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies.

I feel I'm moving toward as well as away from something, and anything is possible.

What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest. 'What do you do?' 'What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?' 'Why not?' She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams. 'Because... I don't know,' she sighs. I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.

It's like my characters, all my men are Dad and me in a mess; all my female characters are smart and hopeful, like Mom just trying to make the best of things.

I totally relate to Tom Cruise. He's not crazy, it's just the litany of the mid-life crisis.