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Matthew Specktor Biography

Matthew Specktor

Matthew Specktor (born 1966) is an American novelist and screenwriter.

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Matthew Specktor Quotes

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

Enough, Know, Know How, Make, Novel

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.

Central, Culture, Fiction, Passionate, People, Used

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

Breeding, Business, Famous, Hollywood, Monstrous, Quality

There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.

Art, Betrayal, Kind, Take, Write, Writing

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.

Fulfilled, Industry, Mom, Motion, People, Roles

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

Hard, Imagine, Multinational, Multinationals, Writing

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.

Culture, Know, Novel, Obsessed, People, Ridiculous

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

90S, Casualties, Culture, People, Watched

I grew up with such mixed feelings about LA, but I do love it. I grew up lectured by Woody Allen, for example, that LA was absurd, worthy of ridicule and contempt. Most people seem to describe Los Angeles as elementally despicable, or as someplace that requires an apology.

Apology, Feelings, Los, People, Ridicule

I like writing sentences. It's tactile and exciting. Whereas working at the level of the scene is a more cerebral pleasure.

Exciting, Pleasure, Scene, Sentences, Writing

I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.

Feelings, General, Los Angeles, Mixed, Mixed Feelings, Movie

When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L. A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea.

20S, Astonished, Hated, Ideas, Like, People

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.

Altar, Decision, Life, Literature, Sacrifice

Good fiction necessarily encompasses our limited understandings of one another, and of ourselves.

Encompasses, Fiction, Good, Limited, Understanding, Understandings

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

Apparatchik, Corporations, People, Real, Thinking

I've always felt that the basic unit of writing fiction is the sentence, and the basic unit of the screenplay is the scene.

Basic, Scene, Screenplay, Sentence, Unit, Writing

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.

Film, Like, Nowhere, Record, Records, Running

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

Celebration, Prelude, Ridicule, Sometimes

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.

Central, Fiction, James, Meaningful, People

I've always found too that somewhere in whatever you've just written lies the seed of what you're going to write next.

Found, Lying, Next, Write, Writing, Written

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