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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.

Matthew Specktor

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Matthew Specktor
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Literature
Goats
Spirit
Altar
Way
Altars
Always
Humane
Life
Sacrifice
Like
Necessary
Goat
Ways
Sacrificing
Decision
Malicious

More quotes by 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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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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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.
Matthew Specktor
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The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.
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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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
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 think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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