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I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.

Matthew Specktor

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Matthew Specktor
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Gains
Writers
Think
Thinking
Misread
Vitality
Gain

More quotes by 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'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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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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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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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 think the publishing industry is dismayingly like the movie business. It grows more corporate by the day.
Matthew Specktor
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
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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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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I do have complicated feelings about Hollywood, but I also have tremendously affectionate ones.
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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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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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