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

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.

Friends come into our lives and friends leave our lives. But friends never leave our hearts. And best friends always get to stay in the best places in our hearts.

God's help is available for us to achieve great things. We must put our hope and trust in the Lord.

We cannot find peace if we are afraid of the windstorms of life.

Experience is a school where a man learns what a big fool he has been.

I've put in as many as 40 weeks a year on stage. It is lonely and restricted, as all artistic life must necessarily be.

The less you talk, the more time you have for the essential things.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn't move, kick it until it does.

I wear glasses myself. As an affectation, as a badge of high intellect and to see with.

You have to find a way to not become bitter and live within the parameters of the situation and laugh your way through it…and you hope for a better day for the next generation.