I think for some reason we're conditioned in movies that the protagonist must be heroic or redeemable in some way, whereas in theater, that's not a necessary.
You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger.
Keeping a habit, in the smallest way, protects and strengthens it. I write every day, even if it's just a sentence, to keep my habit of daily writing strong.
Fiction, for me, is sort of a protracted way of saying all the things I wished I said the night before.
I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.
Why on Earth would the United States ever want to be more like Europe? Correct me if I'm wrong, but we left, did we not? Not only did we leave that older, lesser world behind, but we left skid-marks along the way with an entire continent eating our proverbial dust.
Google, Amazon, Apple. Any number of cloud providers and computer service providers who can increasingly limit your access to your own information, control all your processing, take away your data if they want to, and observe everything you do; in a way, that does give them some leverage over your own life.
Whether we start with a provisional status and legal permanent residence... or we set up some other way to assimilate legally, you can't ever put in something that says, 'You can never become a citizen.' That's un-American.
With regards to the expansion of NATO, I see it as a mistake, even a provocation in a way.
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
People know excessive consumption of anything is bad for health. By imposing a ban on something, we are, in a way, provoking them to do it.
Someone remarked that the newspapers or the news magazines are the same as the psalms except that the names changed in the stories. Maybe you can't understand the psalms without understanding the newspaper and the other way around.
People in D.C. are so psyched when anyone dramatizes them in an exciting way. They're a lot more open to looking at the nastier side of themselves than the media is.
I've always argued that all Tame Impala melodies are pure pop. It's just that 'Lonerism,' for example, is a completely rumbling, fuzzed out psychedelic rock album. But for me, it was just pop music produced the way that I like to produce it.
My mom worked as a psychiatric social worker. She was interested in people, and I guess I am, too. So we would talk about the people that we knew, and why they behaved the way they did.
If I had my way everyone would have a psychiatrist. When the brain is sick and you must throw up, you do it by being purged in a psychiatrist's office.
I suppose I was interested in creating a vision; in the same way, I was very drawn to tension within cinema. Hitchcock was my other early obsession - 'Psycho' and its score. So there was the sense of trying to create an atmosphere: how a sound resonates and makes an effect.
I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do.
It used to be that in comedy you had to play the clubs and work your way up, but now, before you do the clubs, you can put something up on the Internet. It's public access times a million.
I spend way too much time watching television, going to sports games, going to movies. It struck me that there's an awful lot of data in the public domain for these sectors. The movie industry publishes weekly sales numbers - not many industries do.
