Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.

I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.

I have a library room with four desks in it. On one of them is a spec, on one of them is a present work, on one of them is reading for a future work, on another desk is a novel I'm not doing until I'm a hundred and fifty, and things like that. But, contractually speaking, you just do one at a time when it's on and paid and live. You do your real day on one project and the rest is just literary life. Or intrusions.

I learned from Ridley [Scott] how to come out of the trailer at a fast walk and make your decisions and keep it going. We were very much on time and under budget, as they say. That was a very important thing for me and very satisfactory.

My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.

You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.

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