My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be.

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.)

One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

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

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.

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've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.