I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

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.

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.

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

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