Matthew Specktor Quotes

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L.A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea.

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

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

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.

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

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.

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.

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 writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

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

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.

I don't feel like I'm self-conscious about what's next. I don't care. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I know what it's like not to be.

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.

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

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.

I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.

Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

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.

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

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

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

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

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

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."

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

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.

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.

People don't seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that's almost all they ever do, in some sense, is romanticize that place. Los Angeles deserves the same courtesy.

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

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

I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

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

I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.

Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.

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

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.