Quotes

I had just been through, in the years preceding my decampment for the West, a pair of summers that had rattled my nerves and rocked my soul and shook my sense of self - but in a good way. I had drunk a lot, and smoked a lot, and listened to a ton of great music, and talked way too much about all of those activities, and about talking about those activities. I had slept with one man whom I loved, and learned to love another man so much that it would never have occurred to me to want to sleep with him. I had seen things and gone places in and around Pittsburgh, during those summers, that had shocked the innocent, pale, freckled Fitzgerald who lived in the great blank Minnesota of my heart. [describing the events leading up to his writing his first novel, in the article "On 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh'" published in The New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 10, June 9, 2005.]

[on John Carter (2012)] I still feel that we made a very good movie. Solid. Entertaining. Breathtaking. If a movie set on Mars with flying ships, sword fighting, red princesses, villainous villains and dashing heroes doesn't sound like your kind of movie, I understand that. But for people who enjoy that sort of thing - I count myself among that group - I thought it was a perfectly serviceable product.

Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors. At the breakfast table, in my house, an inflexible law compels all recounting of dreams to be compressed into a sentence, or better still, half a sentence, like the paraphrasings of epic films listed in 'TV Guide': 'Rogue Samurai saves peasant village'. The recounting of a dream is - ought to be - a source of embarrassment to the dreamer, sitting there naked in fading tatters of Jungian couture. Whatever stuff dreams are made on, it isn't words. As soon as you begin to tell a dream, as Freud reminds us, you interpolate, falsify, distort; you lie.. Nobody, not even Aunt Em, wants to hear about Dorothy's dream when she wakes up in 'The Wizard of Oz'.

[on director Wes Anderson] With each of his films, Anderson's total command of detail - both the physical detail of his sets and costumes, and the emotional detail of the uniformly beautiful performances he elicits from his actors - has enabled him to increase the persuasiveness of his own family Zemblas, without sacrificing any of the paradoxical power that distance affords.

All movies, of course, are equally artificial. It's just that some are more honest about it than others...Anderson's films understand and demonstrate that the magic of art, which renders beauty out of brokenness, disappointment, failure, decay, even ugliness and violence - is authentic only to the degree that it attempts to conceal neither the bleak facts nor the tricks employed in pulling off the presto change-o. It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker's x:y scale version of the world.

Soul food is the caravansary along the road from the African past to the American present, from freedom to slavery to freedom again. Soul food is the little joint at the broken heart of America where all the kitchen inheritances ingather and get tangled like travellers' yarns, like strands of DNA.