There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

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

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

The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate on such a relatively individual scale.

We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.

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

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