Not Long Ago, A Novelist Could Believe

The Cheesecake Was Smooth And Lush, With The Personality Of A Warm And Well-to-do Uncle Who Knows A Hundred Dirty Jokes And Will Die Of Sexual Exertions In The Arms Of His Mistress.

Film Is More Than The Twentieth-century Art. It's Another Part Of The Twentieth-century Mind. It's The World Seen From Inside. We've Come To A Certain Point In The History Of Film. If A Thing Can Be Filmed, The Film Is Implied In The Thing Itself. This Is Where We Are. The Twentieth Century Is On Film. You Have To Ask Yourself If There's Anything About Us More Important Than The Fact That We're Constantly On Film, Constantly Watching Ourselves.

If We Are On The Outside, We Assume A Conspiracy Is The Perfect Working Of A Scheme. Silent Nameless Men With Unadorned Hearts. A Conspiracy Is Everything That Ordinary Life Is Not. It's The Inside Game, Cold, Sure, Undistracted, Forever Closed Off To Us. We Are The Flawed Ones, The Innocents, Trying To Make Some Rough Sense Of The Daily Jostle. Conspirators Have A Logic And A Daring Beyond Our Reach. All Conspiracies Are The Same Taut Story Of Men Who Find Coherence In Some Criminal Act.

For Most People, There Are Only Two Places In The World. Where They Live And Their Tv Set. If A Thing Happens On Television, We Have Every Right To Find It Fascinating, Whatever It Is.

I'm Very Concerned With Questions Of Language. This Is What I Think Of When I Think Of Myself As A Writer: I'm Someone Who Writes Sentences And Paragraphs. I Think Of The Sentence - Not Only What It Shares But, In A Sense, What It Looks Like. I Like To Match Words Not Only In A Way That Convey A Meaning, Possibly An Indirect Meaning, But Even At Times Words That Have A Kind Of Visual Correspondence.