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a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality."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.

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

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

Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.

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.