Cormac McCarthy is that rare thing in American letters: a writer who manages to balance literary acclaim with a large popular readership. (All of his books since 1992’s All the Pretty Horses, for which he won the National Book Award, have been bestsellers.) He’s also still consistently described as a recluse, despite a recent Oprah appearance and open collaboration with Hollywood. In a conversation with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, he lets slip his admiration of director Terrence Mallick, his distaste for magic realism, and his unlikely friendship with Richard Gere. Here’s McCarthy on appreciating the Bard:

Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet. And I’d seen movies of Hamlet, I’d seen kind of amateurish productions, and I’d read the play. But we walked out of that theater, and we stood there, and we went, “Holy s—.”

Holy s—, indeed.