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.

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.

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

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.

Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

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

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.