I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

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

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

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

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."

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