We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The late '60s certainly was one of them, the Civil War being another, but I'm hard-pressed to think of too many.

Actually, screenplays were much more detailed than what I did in the book In the book I had to invent a style for communicating what the sensation of looking at a film would be, whereas the screenplays I wrote in Paris were actual blueprints for how to do the film, with every gesture, every little movement noted in exhaustive detail.

Money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.