You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

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

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.

One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

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