I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be.

I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

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 have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.