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My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

Matthew Specktor

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Matthew Specktor
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Parent
Adolescent
Littles
Awhile
Little
Pretentious
Patient
Accept
Took
Accepting
Parents
Snobbery

More quotes by Matthew Specktor

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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.
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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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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
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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.
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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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I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.
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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
Matthew Specktor
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The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
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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
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I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.
Matthew Specktor
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I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
Matthew Specktor
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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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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.
Matthew Specktor