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

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

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

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 worked in the mail room at CAA when I was in high school. I worked in the literary department, too. That was my after school job, believe it or not: I would read manuscripts and then evaluations on whether or not I thought they'd make good movies. Which was fascinating and kind of hilarious to me at the time.

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.