“Shock is a very weird thing.”

“The deep woods can be very dangerous. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous and weird. And weird weird.”

“After this whole acting thing is over and done, you eventually have to be human. Some people are never human. It's very weird.”

“I think part of your success lies in the shock of recognition- or as the Japanese might say, 'the unexpected recognition of the faithful "suchness" of very ordinary things'.”

“Grabbing hold of facts in the midst of shock is very Erudite of him.”

“I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age -- or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people -- they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.”