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.

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

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

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.

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.

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