Latest Matthew Specktor Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Quality

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  People, Soldier, My Favorite

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  People, Problem, Los Angeles

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Apology, People, Feelings

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  People, Culture, Ridiculous

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

  Matthew Specktor

  Writing, Scene

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.

  Matthew Specktor

  Writing, Pleasure, Scene

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

  Matthew Specktor

  Thinking, Secret

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

  Matthew Specktor

  Understanding

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Dream, Drama, Rich

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

  Matthew Specktor

  Lying, Writing, Next

  Source: therumpus.net

• The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

  Matthew Specktor

  Novelists, Impediments

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

  Matthew Specktor

  Thinking, Vitality, Gains

  Source: therumpus.net

• Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.

  Matthew Specktor

  Thinking, Giving, Sometimes

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Art, Betrayal, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Children, Writing, Men

  Source: therumpus.net

• We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live.

  Matthew Specktor

  Literature, Shows, Humane

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Sacrifice, Decision, Literature

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Writing, Self, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Self, Care, Next

  Source: therumpus.net

• Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

  Matthew Specktor

  Book, Nothing To Lose, Written

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.)

  Matthew Specktor

  Thinking, People, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Book, Writing, Giving

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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.

  Matthew Specktor

  Book, Trying, Tvs

  Source: therumpus.net

• 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!

  Matthew Specktor

  Writing, People, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net