It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time — Matthew Specktor Books Copy Share Image
We go to literature because it shows us some set of humane values. It is showing us how to live. — Matthew Specktor Books Copy Share Image
Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose. — Matthew Specktor Book Copy Share Image
I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day. — Matthew Specktor Business Copy Share Image
My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them. — Matthew Specktor Accepting Copy Share Image
Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of. — Matthew Specktor Giving Copy Share Image
It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate. — Matthew Specktor Conglomerate Copy Share Image
I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones. — Matthew Specktor Affectionate Copy Share Image
A Good Soldier is one of my favorite novels, for various reasons. But the class question is a good one, because it's… — Matthew Specktor Books Copy Share Image
There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important… — Matthew Specktor Art Copy Share Image
Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have… — Matthew Specktor Business Copy Share Image
The 90s were the decade in which studio filmmaking became a much more purely corporatized process, when their crassness ceased to operate… — Matthew Specktor Cinema Copy Share Image
Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the… — Matthew Specktor Book Copy Share Image
“Even the regular sufferings of fear were better than the ashen grayness of unfeeling, the numbness that had clutched his heart for… — Matthew Specktor Fear Copy Share Image
These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love. — Matthew Specktor Corporations Copy Share Image
During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of… — Matthew Specktor Casualties Copy Share Image
The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate.… — Matthew Specktor American life Copy Share Image
You look at the absolute scorn that gets poured on a fallen celebrity, whether it's Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan or Marlon… — Matthew Specktor Absolutes Copy Share Image
Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow… — Matthew Specktor Egotistical Copy Share Image
I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books… — Matthew Specktor Book Copy Share Image
Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule. — Matthew Specktor Birthday Copy Share Image
I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general. — Matthew Specktor Business Copy Share Image
The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment. — Matthew Specktor Impediment Copy Share Image
One of the weird things about L.A. is that there's always a set of negative perceptions that attaches itself to this city. — Matthew Specktor Cities Copy Share Image
Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script… — Matthew Specktor Be good Copy Share Image
My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles… — Matthew Specktor Fulfilled Copy Share Image
Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it. — Matthew Specktor Feelings Copy Share Image
When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there… — Matthew Specktor Early 20s Copy Share Image
A lot of talent, a lot of the currency that movies used to have, has spilled over into TV. People talk about… — Matthew Specktor Book Copy Share Image
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 Found Copy Share Image
I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the… — Matthew Specktor Movie Copy Share Image
I don't want to say that having power is overrated, but powerlessness can give rise to a different kind of authority, and… — Matthew Specktor Authority Copy Share Image
Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those… — Matthew Specktor Figures Copy Share Image
My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of… — Matthew Specktor Areas Copy Share Image
People don't seem to have a problem with a romanticized New York, in fact that's almost all they ever do, in some… — Matthew Specktor Courtesy Copy Share Image
100 million dollars used to be the limit of what a movie might cost; now they routinely cost 300 million. Sooner or… — Matthew Specktor Cost Copy Share Image
I'm going to write what I feel like writing, which is a great place to be. But it can be hard to… — Matthew Specktor Consciousness Copy Share Image
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 Fiction Copy Share Image
There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can… — Matthew Specktor Believe Copy Share Image
I think having power ingrains people with a conservatism. There's a tendency to hedge one's bets. (Which explains a lot, actually, about… — Matthew Specktor Business Copy Share Image
