A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.

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

We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.

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

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

The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.

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