Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of..

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 thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a chi….

You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he go….

I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kin….

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to….

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose..

We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live..

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next..

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or neces….

The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate on such a r….

We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogatin….

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 authorit….

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….

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….

A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize wit….

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 movi….

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 bo….

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene..

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. L….

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 the….