It’s easy to try to exaggerate the problems just to get more attention. So for me, it was very clear that the best way to deal with that was to do the best science that I was capable of doing.

I’ve had this concern all the time, but I can only hope that if one writes with appreciation and delicacy and respect, then it’s okay. I have to say that I’ve written a hundred times as much as I’ve published, because if there’s any thought of offense or embarrassment, then I will put the thing quietly away.

I’m still astonished that somebody would offer me a job and pay me to do what I wanted to do. And to this day, that’s been the astonishment of my life, and delight of my life, and the wonder of my life, and the puzzlement that anybody would be so stupid as to be willing to do that. I hear all these success stories of people, these captains of industry, these forgers of the world, and empire builders and so on. And they talk about all the money they’ve made and become presidents and all that, and I thought, jeez, but look at me. When I was offered a chance to be head of studios I wouldn’t take it. I like to work with the tools of my trade. The tools of my trade is a lot of paper and a pencil, and that’s all it is.

There were times when I thought I wanted to be a cartoonist. If I weren’t a film director, I think cartoons would have been a good alternative. But I never properly studied drawing, so my drawings are strange. But when I’m prepping films, it’s good preparation — and comforting to me — to do the storyboards. It’s fun, too, like drawing a whole comic.

Yes, because it seems to me that poetry cannot be hermetically closed to thinking. And thinking always enters the field of contradiction. So it also has to do with the way I try to reconcile poetry versus thinking. … I think you’re right that for many American poets, poetry is almost an escape from the cruelty of thinking, from the choices you make when you think. Escaping your life—which may be tragic, but it’s not problematic. So I see it differently, as a necessity to confront these categories.