I think it's my job or the artist's job, to try and find some solution or some reason to accept things. But given the grimmest reality, I feel the grimmest facts are the real facts, the true facts: that you're born, you die, you suffer, it's to no purpose, and you're gone forever, ever, ever, and that's it.

I never have an alter ego in the movies. That's a fiction that the press has made up over the years, and it's fun to write that. It gives them something to write.

Until you've been kissed on a rainy Parisian afternoon - you've never been kissed.

You're a genius! And the proof is that both common people and intellectuals find your work completely incoherent.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

These were always obsessions of mine, even as a very young child. These were things that interested me as the years went on. My friends were more preoccupied with social issues - issues such as abortion, racial discrimination, and Communism - and those issues just never caught my interest. Of course they mattered to me as a citizen to some degree...but they never really caught my attention artistically.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.