A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's not always easy to empathize with privileged people.

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.

When people ask me how I am I tell them......"I'm present

Although it's good to have talent, character is so much important because bad character is an enemy for great talent.

She could live without her past. She was better off without her past. But Ian couldn’t live without his heart.

[To organize a school] looks much more difficult in theory than it does in practice.

We never get to love by hate, least of all by self-hatred.

The absolute worst thing you can do in a scene is be apathetic.

Even in the darkness, every color can be found. And every day of rain brings water flowing to things growing in the ground.

The people you save won't celebrate you. They'll gather the wood and cheer while you burn.

It doesn't matter how we were raised. We become the person we choose to be.

Making music for Radiohead is like going to the bathroom, I'm just going to the bathroom constantly, and millions are watching me go to the bathroom.