I often wonder if there are certain areas of real life that are roped off, with a sign saying, "Art, don't come in here." But that's maybe a deeper question ...

I'm not sure I would call it agony but there is a kind of cyclic frustration. You get one story right and then here comes another one. When does that end? What I'm trying to do is get it to end right now, by recognizing that that cycle is writing. That is: trying to understand the frustrations and setbacks (and agony) as part of a bigger chess game you are playing with art itself.

So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

Metaphorically speaking, of course, if I put a problem behind my pillow and fall asleep, very often because my brain went to sleep with that idea or the problem alive, very often in the middle of the night I wake up, and I wake up with a solution or with a direction of solution.

I didn't go to school much. I was thrown out of different schools, and my university is the street.

I wanted all my life to give my world into other arts - books, plays, movies - but I didn't want to sell out.

My first walk illegally at 20 years old was between the towers of Notre Dame.

It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

I am not up there by chance. I am there by choice. And I know the wire. And I know my limits. And I am a madman of details.

On a very long and very high wire, I will not hope to not be blown off by high winds. I will have the certitude that such could not happen.

As a high wire walker, I do not allow myself to 'leave the wire' during a performance.

My parents wanted me to have an honorable profession and not to be a jester.

Of course, the slightest little mistake on the wire will deprive me of my life, so in that sense, yes, it is a dangerous profession. You have to pay attention; if not, you will lose your life.

It is very normal for people on the ground to look at somebody apparently walking in midair and thinking first that person is crazy and thinking secondly that person risks his or her life.

It would be very, very dangerous for a wire walker to experience fear while he is balancing on the wire. Fear has its place on earth, before and maybe after a high-wire walk, but not during for me.

When I was learning by myself, despite my parents, despite my teachers, despite society, when I was fighting for building my life as a young wire walker at age 16, I didn't have feelings, I had certainties.

I'm a wire-walker, but actually, I'm a moviemaker that hasn't done his first movie.

I was not born into the world of the stuntman and the daredevil; I was born into the world of theater and writing and sculpting and classical music.

I would like to continue to tell stories of what I did in a biographical way, so I will continue to write.

Certainly, in the story of my life, the walk between the Twin Towers was one of the grandest, one of the most memorable, but not solely the grandest and the most memorable.

Talking about theater, actually, I built a little barn in upstate New York, and I call it 'the smallest theater in the world,' but it has a mini stage and a red velvet curtain.

When art in general, and film in particular, succeeds is when it pulls you away onto a voyage. Then it's a good film.

If I had been born in the circus, my parents would have pushed me on that little high wire at four years old. That's when the body is most limber to learn those acrobatics.