My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.

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

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

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

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.

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."