I admit there’s an element of brutality in all my work - it’s part of the truth about human existence I always want to explore - but the last thing I’m trying to do is put on some kind of freak show, inviting people to get off on other people’s pain and humiliation.

In particular, people have trouble understanding where I stand in relation to my characters, and very often this gets reduced to me making vicious fun of them.

Art has a smaller audience than, say, movies or other forms of mass consumption. But that doesn't mean the work doesn't have an impact in a way that transcends just a few cultural arbiters.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

I mean, I don't want to sound - of course it's very nice, people come up and say appreciative things about my work. But the loss, in terms of privacy and anonymity, is no small thing to me.

You always have to be ahead of the audience so that they have to always catch up and know the movie's not quite going exactly where you think it's going, or expecting it to be going.

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top.