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 don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and that's the kind of authority that writes books.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

…to own only a little talent…was an awful, plaguing thing….being only a little bit special meant you expected too much, most of the time.

We need to have faith in the future to make sense of the present.

I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.

Another world exists that I must experience. A genus of people exists who I must meet. I must inhale the air they breathe--share their world at all costs.

I can safely say, that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.

I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help - to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings.

I just think the American people had better understand what's going on. This is a bunch of scumbags. That's what [Russians] are!

Know when your space is too small for you...and you have to birthed to the next level!