“It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

Discovery is the joy.

So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

I’m sensing something and I’m going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted – Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.

Many years ago I found out something about hamburgers that really grossed me out. You may not know this, so I hope I don’t make you sick, but it turns out hamburgers are actually made out of dead cows.

That’s something the kids should know about. Reading is a gateway to witchcraft and lesbianism.

I do original songs in the style of other artists, where I try to learn all their musical idiosyncrasies and try to do something that sounds like them and yet is a bit more sick and twisted.

Better to die of something than to die in old age of nothing.

I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it,

Here in these films [Salome the play and Salomaybe], I have the opportunity to say something about how I feel about things.

It would be hard to play a character you don’t like – for me anyway – or can’t find something in them to like.