It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.

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