I like smoking pot, but I'm not the kind of guy who smokes every day.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

Before I started to make films, I didn't give much thought to the way the characters were physically positioned in the story world.

I usually start writing stories from tone and not from content - kind of like people who create music and invent the lyrics later on.

Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.

You take a book, and what can you do with a book? Can you cook an egg on a book? No. Can you dig a hole? No. Is it a good weapon? No. The fact that it's good for nothing kind of makes it almost all-important.

I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too.