The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.

I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.

Memoirs have dominated the literary scene now for ten or 20 or even 30 years: most of them seem to use the conventions of fiction and it's astonishing how in so many of these books people seem to be able to remember conversations that took place when they were five years old and give three pages of coherent dialogue, which is utterly impossible.

Art is not politics. The glory of the novel is that in its essence, it is a democratic form, because it treats individuals as worthy of scrutiny. That alone is a kind of political act. A good novel about a tea party of rich women can be just as galvanizing and important to the soul as War and Peace, so I think it's not really the job of artists to do anything. They can have their opinions as private citizens, but they must continue making their art.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.