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

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

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

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.

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.

Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

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