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.

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 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.

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."

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.

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

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.