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

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

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.

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)

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

I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.