Matt Dillon

One thing that everybody told me about directing was, 'Never compromise'. And the whole job is a compromise. So it's very paradoxical. How do you not compromise when the whole thing is about compromise?

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.