There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.

What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.

I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.

Pleasure and Pain participate equally in moulding character.

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

If rejections were cash, I'd be rich

A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.

Advice: The suggestions you give someone else which you hope will work for your benefit.

(As) a director who is a writer, I have respect for writers, so I'm less likely to step on an idea or a line.

We have ideas of God and nirvana or truth or enlightenment. These ideas will go away in nirvana because the suffusion is so complete and intense that nothing can be remembered.

The devil does not tempt people whom he finds suitably employed.

I love touring, I really do.

There is more of fear than delight in a secret pleasure.