I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.

I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time