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

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

I don't feel like I'm self-conscious about what's next. I don't care. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I know what it's like not to be.

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.

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."

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

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.