We are the storytelling animal.
When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
The Republicans were not always insane. They might’ve had politics I didn’t agree with, but they weren’t always actually certifiable.
The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
You don’t fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: ‘We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.’
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
There’s a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody’s family. We all pretend to outsiders that it’s not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.
You want all your books to stick around after you’ve gone.
You don’t that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that’s a loss.
The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don’t try and burn the planet down.
In a novel, if you’re any good, you don’t just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.
People are always telling me that they’ve seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don’t know quite what you’ve got.
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You’d have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
If you’re offended, it’s your problem.
Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.