You can’t really trust anybody who doesn’t talk a lot, because how would you know what they’re thinking?

War is such a peculiar thing – inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning – even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops.

I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn’t controlled anymore.

I actually like doing commercials. I don’t like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them. The 30-second format is very hard. I sometimes call it American Haiku. And I think some of the commercials I’ve done are not so bad.

Listening to what people were saying wasn’t even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying.

I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It’s a kind of enforced silence.

I’m really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

I don’t believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don’t think such a claim has any meaning.

When you start talking about the known knowns and the unknown unknowns, you’re thrown into a crazy meta-level discussion. Do I know what I know, do I know what I don’t know, do I know what I don’t know I don’t know. It becomes a strange, Lewis Carroll – like nursery rhyme.

People think in narratives – in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse still, it leaves people with the disquieting impression that something is being hidden.