I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

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.

I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.

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've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.

I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.