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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: 57
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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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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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 think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
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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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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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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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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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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I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.
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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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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My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.
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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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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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
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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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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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The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
Matthew Specktor