The feature film business, the studio film business, feels to me like there's just nowhere else to go. It's like a record that's just skipping at the end, with the needle stuck in the run-out groove.

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.

There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, “Who is here the sheykh?” he would answer him “I am he.

I don't have to negotiate an arms agreement with Great Britain or with France.

Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families.

For in the wood these golden days Some leaf obeys its Maker's call. And through their hollow aisles it plays With delicate touch the prelude of the Fall.

Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect.

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class.

Within each piece, I create an intriguing balance between jewelry and the body, and an intensity which draws others to it.

At the time we acquired Viacom, everyone said I had overpaid. But even at today's depressed prices, that investment is worth billions. Everyone was saying MTV was a fad. I knew better.

Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?