An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

Premie' re approximation: j'e cris pour de truire, en les de crivant avec pre cision, des monstres nocturnes qui menacent d'envahir ma vie e veille e. First general point: I write to destroy, by describing exactly the nocturnal monsters that threaten to invade my waking life.

An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

I'm very analytical, I'm very precise. I mean, I don't write for kids.

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.

I probably write a poem every 50 years.

I read a lot. I spend of lot time thinking. It actually looks like I'm doing nothing, but... hanging out with clever and interesting people is a must if you're writing comedy, like hanging out with a good bass player when you're a drummer.