My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

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.

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

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.

Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.

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.