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.

I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.

Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.

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

Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.

You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.

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.