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

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.

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.

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

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

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.