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

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.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

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

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.

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.