I think it's why we're able to look at with comic book stories or origin stories, why is it that we can keep retelling these stories over and over? And hopefully it's because it hits something so universal and so primal inside of us that we actually yearn for that same story over and over. But toned and different form, and updated and modernized, and I can go into the specifics.

I'm a writer who doesn't much think about money because money doesn't really care about me. In other nations, art gets subsidized. Writers aren't wealthy by any means, but there's the idea that the state supports the creation of art.

I think there are a lot of writers who would never have an opportunity to make their work. Some presses rely heavily on the NEA. Translators cannot support themselves on translating. It would be isolating artistically. It would diminish experimental output. It would have a homogenizing effect on the work that was made.

I like violence because I like looking at it and I like understanding emotional and physical violence and how they work with one another... It's operating in all these levels of hopefully - Oedipus is one of my favorite stories, that's like falling down a well when you read that - so that would be the hope, that each thing causes the next.

Art changed my life. I mean, I would say art saved me. I believe that it made me better at handling my life.

I don't make movies about issues. This is my same litmus test for all the movies I love: Is it a great character on a great emotional quest with a great emotional need? Do they overcome great emotional obstacles? Is it a fantastic story? I didn't set out to be a political activist. I'm just a human being who's moved by certain things, and if certain things break my heart, I set out to fix them.

If you do really good storytelling, things that people also might anticipate and that they might have seen before - there's a reason we go back to stories that we love - so, even if there is a familiarity, if you can do it a different way and hopefully do it well enough, you actually feel the satisfaction of that anticipation given back to you.