I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.

For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.

I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.

I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.

The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.

Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.