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.)

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

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

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.

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

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.