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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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Matthew Specktor
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Writing
Write
Going
Another
Kind
Place
Like
Self
Hard
Feel
Stricken
Feels
Consciousness
Great
Easy

More quotes by 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.
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The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
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Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
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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.
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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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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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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 think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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