During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

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.

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.

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.

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