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 parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

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

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.

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

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