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

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

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.)

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

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.

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

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.