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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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Matthew Specktor
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 21
Novelist
Screenwriter
LA
California
Easy
Novels
Reason
Soldier
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Always
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Empathize
Class
Privileged
More quotes by Matthew Specktor
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
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
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
Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.
Matthew Specktor
Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.
Matthew Specktor
My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.
Matthew Specktor
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
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
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
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
Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.
Matthew Specktor
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
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
I think writers can gain a lot of vitality from being misread.
Matthew Specktor
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
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
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
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
I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.
Matthew Specktor
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
