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.

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

People don't seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that's almost all they ever do, in some sense, is romanticize that place. Los Angeles deserves the same courtesy.

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

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