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

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.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We've kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don't need. I'm anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that's it.

I can remember saying again and again and again, "A terrible thing has happened, but this should be a kind of wake-up call for our country, and we have a great opportunity now to reinvent ourselves. To rethink our position about oil and energy, to rethink our relationship with other cultures and other countries, and why other people want to attack us."

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics