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

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

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be.

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

I don't feel like I'm self-conscious about what's next. I don't care. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I know what it's like not to be.

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.