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

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.