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

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.

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

I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!