I tend to shape my life through aesthetic principles rather than economic ones – I’ve never been very good at maths.

I still regard adventure pretty much as a hobby to tell you the honest truth, and I think this approach to it keeps one refreshed almost. I think if you just regard adventure as a business, working becomes very boring as many other businesses can become. But even though adventure changed my life considerably, both in what I was doing and even economically, I’ve always regarded myself in a sense as a competent amateur.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

There were times when I thought I wanted to be a cartoonist. If I weren’t a film director, I think cartoons would have been a good alternative. But I never properly studied drawing, so my drawings are strange. But when I’m prepping films, it’s good preparation — and comforting to me — to do the storyboards. It’s fun, too, like drawing a whole comic.

It just matters how you respond to that having your confidence shaken, that makes you what you are.

I just lack the basic fact-finding instinct.

Don’t read your reviews. […] Don’t write reviews. (Your judgment’s always tainted.) […] Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

Oh yeah. In finishing this book, the last thing that I did, I read every story aloud and made some changes in every one of them.

I sometimes I have the inability to see how I can do what I need to do at a high enough level for me to do it.

People just were the mysterious sum of their actions.