One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.

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.

I could never hate you, even if I wanted to.

Hope is a dangerous thing, Raisa thought. Once kindled, it's hard to put out. It makes wise people into fools.

Allah gave the Qur'an to a very special man, who passed it on to us, for the rest of all our days.

Cheap grace is grace without discipleship.

You're pregnant? Congratulations, the world needs another mindless, semiliterate consumer.

Self-expression is my goal, I want to be real with my feelings. Singing and dancing and all the joy that goes with performing come from my heart. If I can't feel it, I won't do it.

The advantage of modern means of communication is they enable you to worry about things in all of the world

When I look at my goal, my goal is peace.

There is something more to "reality" than just the tangible. There is also mood, and you cannot skip that.

The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.