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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.

Matthew Specktor

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Matthew Specktor
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Records
Needles
Business
Feature
Running
Nowhere
Else
Studio
Film
Features
Ends
Studios
Skipping
Feels
Stuck
Needle
Like
Record
Groove

More quotes by Matthew Specktor

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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.
Matthew Specktor
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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
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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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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.
Matthew Specktor
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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.
Matthew Specktor
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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
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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.
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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My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.
Matthew Specktor
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Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.
Matthew Specktor
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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.
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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Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.
Matthew Specktor
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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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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
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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
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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.
Matthew Specktor
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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!
Matthew Specktor
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I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
Matthew Specktor