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

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

A lot of talent, a lot of the currency that movies used to have, has spilled over into TV. People talk about TV the way they used to talk about movies and, as much as I hate to say it, the way they used to talk about books.

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.

The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate on such a relatively individual scale.

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

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.