Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Matthew Specktor
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Book
Powerlessness
Giving
Overrated
Different
Writes
Writing
Rise
Kind
Authority
Books
Power
Give
More quotes by Matthew Specktor
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.
Matthew Specktor
Usually when people say they have mixed feelings about something, it's a sort of euphemistic way of saying they hate it.
Matthew Specktor
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
I think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
Matthew Specktor
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
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
I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.
Matthew Specktor
The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
Matthew Specktor
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
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
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
I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
Matthew Specktor
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
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
Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
Matthew Specktor
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
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
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
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
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
