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

You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.

One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

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

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

Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)