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.

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

I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.