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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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Matthew Specktor
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Power
Conservatism
Way
Publishing
Think
Tendency
Thinking
Tendencies
People
Industry
Movie
Bets
Actually
Hedge
Business
Explains

More quotes by 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.
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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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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 think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
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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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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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I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.
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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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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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