War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

We don't really know how technology will affect narrative. That's the question. See, people used to say that the novel is going to die, but they would never say that movies will die with it, when in fact all forms depend on the narrative. I think if one of them fails, the others are going to fail as well. Maybe this will happen to both forms, and maybe movies will take a totally different direction with fiction.

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.