Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

You have to make sure you have the characters you want. That's really the most complicated part.