There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

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 am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.

God bless me and my son John Me and my wife him and his wife Us four and no more.

Mind you, I've been here during the bad times too - one year we came second.

What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?

It does not seem a year Since last we sent to you Our wishes for your special day And all that you would do.

Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.

Think of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. They used the same actors over and over again.

I have wished you something None of the others would.

There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others.

On the whole, the longing for solitude is a sign that there still is spirit in a person and is a measure of what spirit there is.