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.

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

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

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.