As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I’m not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am.
I do not repeat conversations that I can’t remember. And it’s something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
I don’t read reviews any more, but I’m told by my publisher who gives me an account of what people have been writing and it’s been a very split kind of response.
Books demand more. You have to be a more active participant.
Often it’s true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.
Having made films, I know very well that the scope of the average 90- to 120-minute movie is about the same narrative heft as a long short story or a novella.
The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.
When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn’t mean it’s not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas.
I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I’m not thinking about my own life.
It’s always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.
Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It’s everything at once.
Fiction creating reality.
The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.
I’ve been very lucky in this second marriage. It’s just luck. It’s absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happened that didn’t, so overall I feel blessed.
I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can’t tell you how lucky I feel, that I’ve managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I’ve been able to do what I want to do.
Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can’t we?
Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it’s not a completely hermetic exercise. It’s really an opening up.
In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I’ve done it, each time I’ve done it I’ve felt deeply immersed in the material as I’m doing it, and then it’s over and everything is the same.
I think there might be some pressure released while I’m doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.
I think most writers can’t really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that’s probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.