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

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.

Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.

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

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.