We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect.

I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.

It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, where as you can watch a film-and even enjoy it-in a state of mindless passivity.