There's a big difference between having relatives who have money and actually having it yourself. Just because you have a cousin who has a lot of money doesn't mean he shares it with you. Or that you'd ask him for a loan.
I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.
Mary McCarthy and that Mr. Intellectual kind of guy ... Dwight McDonald? And they were really mean about [Jerome David] Salinger, and oh they were going to destroy him, and just look how thoroughly they destroyed him! No one reads Salinger anymore!
[Jerome David] Salinger was really taken to the cleaners by nasty critics in his day. I think Joan Didion was one of the people who attacked him in a very unfair way.
I think a lot of ["Cosmopolitans"] is marked by [Jerome David] Salinger. Salinger wouldn't allow his works to be adapted for film after his experience with "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," and I think that's great for us because then we have to do our own Salinger stories.
Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.
In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.
We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.
I think crazy people are helpful, crazy people who are the catalysts who make other things happen for everyone else. It's almost as if they're not really making things happen in their own life, but their hyperactivity is triggered for everyone else.
Sometimes you don't realize how dependent you are on just a few people, and if they disappear, suddenly you can be thrown on your own resources, which may be limited, and you're really in a fix. So I think that's authentic to the experience that it might be very lonely.
You can't go by what the governments say or do. It's not the governments. It's on the street where there's more hatred of Americans in Britain than in France.
