The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

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.

I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.

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."

Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.

The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate on such a relatively individual scale.

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.