Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

People don't seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that's almost all they ever do, in some sense, is romanticize that place. Los Angeles deserves the same courtesy.

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live.

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

I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kind of self-consciousness or another.

100 million dollars used to be the limit of what a movie might cost; now they routinely cost 300 million. Sooner or later, spectacle is just going to have to find a new way to exist.