I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.

Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.

Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.