Not very well. I try to win the next one. I've always been told that you should win and lose with a smile, but since I became a professional, I've thought the best way of learning to deal with defeat is not to lose.

Writing fiction is not “self-­expression” or “therapy”. Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.

This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. We've all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we're missing the most important piece of information, which is: What is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it's tiny?

Yes, but not with a formula. So there are many, many efforts now to decentralize and they create a rigid formula and give people rules from on top and say, 'Now it's yours.' And that isn't worked very well either. … And, you think about the variety. If you look at a countryside, think of the variety out there in terms of the ecological variety. Well, if people are going to manage ecological variety, no single set of rules will work in a semi-arid versus a tropical-wet region. They have to be different.

Most people, these days, they don’t even believe in reincarnation. They’d say, you only go around once.

I dream to keep on getting ideas and working.

I’m in a transition, Hans. I am painting, and I am painting over and then painting, and then painting over, and destroying, and painting, and destroying, and painting over. I am just trying to find the next thing, and the only way I think I can find it is to keep doing things and learning from it.

If I had found something that was better than TM, I’m not stupid, I would have gone and done that. We’re looking for the best thing we can get for ourselves.

But there’s always a way. Sometimes restrictions are a big blessing.

I don’t know if that is true. There have been 110 or more years of cinema, and it’s impossible for any one of us to make a film that can’t be compared to something that has come before. To me Blue Velvet is Blue Velvet and Rear Window is Rear Window. You could say that Sunset Boulevard or Rear Window has conjured an idea for me, but even though I love them or am inspired by them, life is a 24/7 movie. Ideas come out of that all the time. It’s hard to say it’s cinema that conjures ideas. It’s altogether.