I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.

Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.

I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

Doing crime films...maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.