I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.