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.

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.

Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.

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