I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kind of self-consciousness or another.

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

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

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."

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 do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.