Matthew Specktor Quotes
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During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.
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I thought, writing is everything, it's so much more important than this or that. If only I could give that young man a stern talking to. Having a child changes things quite a bit.
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I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.
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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.
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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.
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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
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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.
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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."
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I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.
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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.
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The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
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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.
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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.
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One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city.
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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.
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Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.
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These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.
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I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.
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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.
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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.
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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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