Matthew Specktor
I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."Collection: Book
Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.Collection: Needs
My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be.Collection: People
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.Collection: Thinking
Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.Collection: Meaningful
I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.Collection: Thinking
It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.Collection: Writing
The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.Collection: Dream
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."Collection: Wall
During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.Collection: People
These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.Collection: Real
I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.Collection: Writing
It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same timeCollection: Enough
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!Collection: Writing
The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.Collection: Novelists
A lot of talent, a lot of the currency that movies used to have, has spilled over into TV. People talk about TV the way they used to talk about movies and, as much as I hate to say it, the way they used to talk about books.Collection: Hate
100 million dollars used to be the limit of what a movie might cost; now they routinely cost 300 million. Sooner or later, spectacle is just going to have to find a new way to exist.Collection: Dollars
Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.Collection: Hate
I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.Collection: Feelings
I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.Collection: Feelings
I worked in the mail room at CAA when I was in high school. I worked in the literary department, too. That was my after school job, believe it or not: I would read manuscripts and then evaluations on whether or not I thought they'd make good movies. Which was fascinating and kind of hilarious to me at the time.Collection: Jobs
My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.Collection: Mom
I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.Collection: Teenager
My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.Collection: Parent
Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.Collection: Teenager
One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Running
People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.Collection: Thinking
The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate on such a relatively individual scale.Collection: Individual
You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon Brando, or Elvis when he got fat. They're not allowed the dignity of ordinary failure. And I think that plays into people's notions about Los Angeles, too. It's not allowed to be a regular city with problems.Collection: Thinking
Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.Collection: Celebration
When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L.A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea.Collection: Ideas
Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.Collection: Understanding
I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.Collection: Thinking
We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.Collection: People
I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.Collection: Writing
I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.Collection: Writing
I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.Collection: Apology
People don't seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that's almost all they ever do, in some sense, is romanticize that place. Los Angeles deserves the same courtesy.Collection: People
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.Collection: Quality
I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.Collection: Lying
I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.Collection: Thinking
Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Book
Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.Collection: Book
I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about why the movie business is the way it is, and why the publishing industry is too.)Collection: Thinking
I don't feel like I'm self-conscious about what's next. I don't care. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I know what it's like not to be.Collection: Self
I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to get there. It's so easy to get stricken with one kind of self-consciousness or another.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Sacrifice