I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.