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.

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

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.

My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

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

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.