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.

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

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.

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

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