I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can't really measure degrees of difficulty.

I say at the very end of "Winter Journal" that I do dream about my father often. I think I have a tremendous compassion for him, which has grown over the years. A certain kind of pity for him also in that he was so unrealised as a human being, so dogged, and so shut-off from people in many ways. You know, I've been writing another book, and it's another non-fiction autobiographical work, kind of a compliment to "Winter Journal", and it's just finished.

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.