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.

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

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

A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.

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

We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.

Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.