It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
I'm not very interested in people. I recognize it in myself - there is a basic indifference toward people.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
We imagine things - that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. We have no choice, so we do it.
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
All of these things we do without children, and suddenly we don't do them anymore, and it comes home to us in a real way, that it's very different to have the responsibility of a child.
Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.