I grew up with very little religious training. Actually, like, none. I think what Jewishness I felt as a kid stemmed almost entirely from this atrocity in our family tree.

I would never ever condone any violence of any kind. But in the theater of fiction, blood is delightful.

I have a feeling the writers who find screenwriting difficult are usually just not lazy enough for the job. They don't know how to stop before the task is done. I've always had a knack for leaving things unfinished, which makes screenwriting easier for me than most.

Livability has always struck me as a consolation prize.

Yo can’t reason someone out of something he didn’t reason himself into.

I think Trump has made it really hard for people to read, period. He's made it hard for me anyway. Part of his evil is the way it constantly distracts us, constantly upends our horizon. To leave your computer for three hours now is to miss a year's worth of drama. This is programmatic and common to other autocratic regimes of our times.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.