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.

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

I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

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