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 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.)

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 think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

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've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.