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

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

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.

We did all the tourist crap, but I just wanted to sit in a cafe and watch people

The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy.

We race toward the future at the velocity of the present.

I had arranged a birthday party for him and my children, who are all Aquarians. Instead, we got married. I ran out of excuses. It was just us and my children.

It is no longer a matter of expressing reality, but of expressing what one feels about reality.

I stay active and choose to associate myself with like-minded people.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

I'm not sure that some of the food purists are in touch with what really goes on in American households.

My childhood was spent embracing one literary heroine after another. I identified passionately with each one and would slavishly imitate them.

People are afraid to die, and even more afraid to live.