Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

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.

By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.