I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.