I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.
Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one... ...I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.
I'm not smart enough to write about something that didn't actually happen to me. But I couldn't write a space movie if you put a gun to my head.
All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.
When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.
Stephen King, by far, is the standard-bearer. I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish. I read his book 'On Writing' before I read pretty much any of his fiction.
Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.
Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.
My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.
I certainly couldn't have written 'Angela's Ashes' when my mother was alive, because she would have been ashamed.
I'm ashamed to say, I've done hideous pen portraits of people I don't like in my novels. And they'll say, 'Oh, that person was hideous,' and I'm nodding, and I'm thinking, 'It's you, you fool!'
When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.
