I don't beat at the details, but I do always keep in mind that anything that isn't A) moving the story forward or B) enlarging my understanding of the central characters has to be sacrificed. I have huge folders of details - research - with a story like Netherlands. Only a very small part of it gets used. The old iceberg analogy again.

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

I'll find something in what I read that snags my imagination in emotional terms; it resonates with me for reasons more complicated than just that it seems like it would make a good story.

I don't think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it's about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of empathy. I do think empathy can be learned. And enhanced.

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

I have written screenplays. Most recently for Errol Morris, who was thinking about doing his first fiction movie, and with a young director who wanted to adopt Project X. Errol was a hoot. I loved talking with him. We were a good match, too, because we both kept joking that we'd found the only other person on earth more ambivalent than we were about the project.

I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.