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.

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

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