Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.

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

I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.

I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.

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.

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.

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.