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

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.

Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it.

Zweck sein selbst ist jegliches Tier. Each animal is an end in itself.

It is not good to cross the bridge before you get to it.

The only thing that is not art is inattention

If we say, 'The government sucks,' we're kind of saying that we suck.

The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

The sun never sets on the British Empire. But it rises every morning. The sky must get awfully crowded.

I realize that was becoming a contradiction in terms, especially after my friend Alison Krauss was shot and killed in Kent State in 1970 on campus by the National Guard.

Admitting that you do not know something is the first step to learning.