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.

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

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.

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.

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

You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.