I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
Motive is never easy. Sometimes it occurs to one only later.
The writer should always serve as his own angleworm – and the sharper the barb with which he fishes himself out of blackness, the better.
It seems like every year Hollywood makes an attempt to retell the Manson story, and I just couldn’t be less interested in it. It’s not really our crowning achievement as a civilisation. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, but it just bores me.
I’ve never had any delusions about being a leading man, and it’s not sour grapes to say that in the best films that I’ve always enjoyed, the cliched leading man type isn’t a part of the picture.
I’m just looking for the best story being told by the best people and the best part that I can find. If those things add up, I want to be a part of it whether it’s a studio film or, more likely in that instance, an independent film.
There’s a lot of skeletons in my closet!
I do all kinds of roles – nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho, nerd, psycho – and occasionally someone kind of normal. It’s weird, when I lived in Austin I was always cast as pretty normal people. But when I moved to Los Angeles I was immediately branded a psycho.
You never really forget who you are. If you did, you’d need to seek some professional help.
I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.
Really, I didn’t like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.
When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.
It’s hard to tell whether the ship or airplane – they’re all the same, I’m convinced – is male or female; it may shift back and forth.
To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.
The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.
I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that’s where I commented someplace on hearing.
I went to a performance of ‘The Crucible’ at the Guthrie when I was a sophomore in high school, and I knew right away that that’s what I wanted to do.
Starting in the mid-’80s, I played in a band called Meat Joy, and we made our own record, toured.
People have said unkind things and you kind of have to, if you happen to read it, you have to just, you know, move on.
Part of the way that I work is to observe.