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.

When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L.A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea.

I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.

I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)

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

We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live.