Matthew Specktor Quotes

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

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."

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L.A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea.

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 child changes things quite a bit.

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

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.)

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'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.

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 necessary decision.

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."

I worked in the mail room at CAA when I was in high school. I worked in the literary department, too. That was my after school job, believe it or not: I would read manuscripts and then evaluations on whether or not I thought they'd make good movies. Which was fascinating and kind of hilarious to me at the time.

A lot of talent, a lot of the currency that movies used to have, has spilled over into TV. People talk about TV the way they used to talk about movies and, as much as I hate to say it, the way they used to talk about books.

I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

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.

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 relatively individual scale.

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 take out the garbage.

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

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.

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

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.

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

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 with privileged people.

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

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

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.

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 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.

Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.

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.

My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be.

The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.

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

I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.

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

One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

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 got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.

I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

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!

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.

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.