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'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kind of self-consciousness or another.

Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

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

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.