It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

When I'm shooting in other cities, I'm just trying to make it look like California.

I will support Iraqis and Syrians fighting to reclaim their communities.

I look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope.

I think video is very useful, but it's very useful when you want a certain reality.

What a creature of strange moods [Winston Churchill] is - always at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of an intense depression.

The biggest thrill I ever had was in 1969, when they held day at Yankee Stadium.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

To look around at what you have accomplished in a day gives a man a good feeling. Too many men work on parts of things. Doing a job to completeness satisfies a man.

When I did red, it was nine, and that was it for me. I said, "Here I am - nine is my number and red is my color, and I'm in business now."

There's something about taking a classic movie that people love and doing another version of that, you're setting yourself up for a mistake.