Quote

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

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Matthew Specktor
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Perceptions
Weird
Perception
Negative
City
Cities
Always
Things
Attaches

More quotes by Matthew Specktor

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I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
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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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It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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!
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I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.
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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.
Matthew Specktor
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I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
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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.
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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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.
Matthew Specktor
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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.
Matthew Specktor
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My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.
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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.
Matthew Specktor