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

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.

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.

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.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

Real relationship is gritty and earthy, the stuff that life is made of.

Every girl needs a bestfriend to help her laugh when she thinks she'll never smile again

In this world love has no color yet how deeply my body is stained by yours.

I will have faith that, though I might not understand why adversity happens, by my conscious choice I can find strength, compassion, and grace through my trials.

I don't necessarily love all the collaborations that I've done; the more I work with other people, the more I realize that I want to work with myself.

The goal of early childhood education should be to activate the child's own natural desire to learn.

There is a great tradition of independent filmmaking in the U.S. that I absolutely respect. There's some wonderful stuff that comes out in this country against all the odds.

Bodies are slow of growth, but are rapid in their dissolution. [Lat., Corpora lente augescent, cito extinguuntur.]

The happy man in this life needs friends.