I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."
Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.
Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!
It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time
I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.
These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.
During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.
There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."
It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.
Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.
I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.
Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
People don't seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that's almost all they ever do, in some sense, is romanticize that place. Los Angeles deserves the same courtesy.
I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.
I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.
I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.
Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.
I don't feel like I'm self-conscious about what's next. I don't care. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I know what it's like not to be.
I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)
I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.
One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.
Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.
I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.
