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

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

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.

100 million dollars used to be the limit of what a movie might cost; now they routinely cost 300 million. Sooner or later, spectacle is just going to have to find a new way to exist.