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For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on.

A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.

The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

Mostly I work really unconsciously, and I think if the scenes are really well written, which they are, and if I just throw myself into it, I don't really think about it.

I think the most satisfying part about filmmaking is seeing a production in full bloom. When I write, I write in isolation.

I don't like to over-intellectualize scenes that are working. I tend to think when you do that you may lose it.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.