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

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

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

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

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.

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.