We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live.

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

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.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

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

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.