Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.'
The challenges are different to different kinds of magazines. News magazines, magazines that have high frequency and news, are going to be challenged, heavily challenged, not just by the Internet but by the whole 24-hour news cycle which has just bee...
Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.
Instead of hoping that some day the boys' club will open its doors, we can form our own clubs, define 'worthy' our own way, and celebrate the books and voices that we decide deserve celebration.
Many writers secretly long to be performers. You always get the 'if you weren't a writer' question. I would be a back-up singer, to stand in the back and go like 'do, do, do.'
I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.
I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking--only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.
I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.
There is, perhaps, no more dangerous man in the world than the man with the sensibilities of an artist but without creative talent. With luck such men make wonderful theatrical impresarios and interior decorators, or else they become mass murderers o...
Los Angeles is a city of few hard targets. Its iconic buildings are private spaces, mostly residential, visible by invitation only or in the pages of a Taschen book. Its central industry is as mirage-like as the projection of light on a screen.
My parents both defected from communist Hungary and were what most people would today call libertarian. I grew up with a general distaste for taxation and any policy that intruded on our lives.
If progressives were interested in mitigating inequality, they would support the dynamism of free markets to allow the merit of ideas, products and services to win the day rather than stifle companies and pick winners in the name of imagined 'progres...
For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.
My audience consists mainly of people who already recognize how bad this culture is, and I want to push them to become more radical. It doesn't really matter to me if they are Left or Right.
Part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it, and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogatio...
I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research.
Who needs a bullet piercing, armor piercing bullet to go hunting? Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting? You can't even use the prey that you kill with an assault rifle if you indeed do it.
I think secrets are something that you keep or are afraid to share because you think they're going to harm you in some way. So if you don't have any secrets, then there's no way anyone can harm you.
The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that's one kind of person, but the fellow who's hiding behind a tree and hoping you don't see him is the fellow that you'd better find out why.
