100 million dollars used to be the limit of what a movie might cost; now they routinely cost 300 million. Sooner or later, spectacle is just going to have to find a new way to exist.

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

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.

Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

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

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.