A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying.