I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.

I think writing should be about change.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

The path to survival was to never give up on the small things.

Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.

The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.