I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

Inevitably, most readers come to John Cheever's 'Journals' via his fiction. Whatever value they might have in their own right, their viability as a publishing proposition was conditional on the interest of the large readership of his novels and stories.

My Tarkovsky idolatry was at its peak, but 'Nostalghia' really didn't do anything for me. 'The Sacrifice' was similarly disappointing for me. Next thing we knew, he was dead.

Physical violence is always a bore in films today. We don't see how much it hurts. We don't learn the true consequences of it.

Cheever constantly voiced doubts about his writing. Reading 'The Naked and the Dead' made him despair of his own 'confined talents.'