I wrote ‘All is Lost’ while editing ‘Margin Call’. I did that long before I knew if I was ever going to get to make another movie.

As a writer, I had learned a lot on ‘Margin Call’ about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.

What is memory but another narrative form?

Music – like narrative, like the experience of our lives as we live them – unfolds in time.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It’s just great to let other people carry the narrative.

I know that the emotional narrative will work in the end, and I just have to play each moment honestly even if the getting from A to B doesn’t totally make sense initially.

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.

On writing himself into the narrative: “I had the idea that most people found me a hostile black boy; I was not that. I had to find a way to make them know it, and the only way was to use myself.

One of the things that’s important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.

I remember that the day I finished ‘The Angels,’ part three of ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’, I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.