I think being central to the culture is overrated. Who really gives a damn if something is popular? Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him.

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.

You have to choose your future regrets.

'Rubberneck' has nothing to do with comedy, nor does it follow comedic people.

Don't you know, that all wives are in the right? It may be you don't, for you are yet a young husband.

I am never going to give music up.

Prayer doesn't change things - God changes things in answer to prayer.

Knowledge without devotion will be like a misfire.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

No one of us is more important than the rest of us.

Worry is the enemy of love. You cannot be in love and be worried at the same time.

Even if you go out there and try to make the most vanilla, non-offensive TV show possible, people are going to criticize you for doing that. It's just part of the game. You can't let it get to you.