I love the idea of the amateur - that's what popular culture is all about. But what the Internet's doing is professionalizing everyone's amateuristic impulses.

Television has to reflect back to you your own sense of security. It also has to mirror your sense of your own decency and your own limitations.

Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.

Every 'Oprah Winfrey Show' has about it the aura of Oprah's own life, just as the rituals and sacraments of a religion are suffused with the life of the religion's founder. Above the testimony of Oprah's guests hovers what viewers know about Oprah's experience.

The business changes, and we don't all have to like the change, but it's, ultimately, the business is changed. But, that being said, I don't like it, and I'll tell you why. Because without the new school that we have right now, or without old school, there would be none of this new school, so it started somewhere, right?

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

The action movies changed radically when it became possible to Velcro your muscles on. It was the beginning of a new era. The visual took over. The special effects became more important than the single person. That was the beginning of the end.