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.

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and themes and even using certain words or images recurrently in my work, no matter how much I think I'm starting fresh. But I've always admired artists who made a specific sport of trying to visit different kinds of genres or mediums or modes - not just 'western' or 'detective', but comedy/tragedy, epic and miniature, traditional/experimental.

I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.