I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.

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 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.

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

I don't feel like I'm self-conscious about what's next. I don't care. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I know what it's like not to be.

Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.