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

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.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.

When grace begins to rule, then our preoccupation with ourselves begins to leave.

The argument holds no water at all, not even a thimbleful.

Yeah, people do need to realize that just because they've seen me perform for an hour does not mean that we are now close.

Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.

I don't throw people under the bus. When I stick by a guy - I may not agree with him all the time, but I sure don't throw him under the bus.

Be what you would seem to be.

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.