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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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Matthew Specktor
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Books
Power
Give
Book
Powerlessness
Giving
Overrated
Different
Writes
Writing
Rise
Kind
Authority

More quotes by 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 writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
Matthew Specktor
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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
Matthew Specktor
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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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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 the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
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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The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
Matthew Specktor
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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
Matthew Specktor
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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.
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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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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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
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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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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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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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
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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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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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Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.
Matthew Specktor