Quotes from Steve Erickson

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

Since I've never had a dream,' she begins, 'one night I woke and went looking for one.

He had thrilled to his own power only in the throes of sex, when he didn't have the presence of mind to know that pleasure wouldn't last forever, and in the flush of freedom, when he was too innocent to know he wasn't free. Now he seized the power that came from that collision of sex with freedom called love.

America One," came Wade's voice from the big shadow, "or America Two?

This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.

The Movies have always been here. The Movies were here before God. Time is round like a reel of film. God hates the Movies because the Movies are the evidence of what He's done.

You're in the lights and he thinks you're exposed, he's in the dark and he thinks he's hidden. But he's not hidden, he's dead, and you're not exposed, you're alive.

As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.

He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can't see it anymore, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward.

I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that's been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks.

I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn't an act of fury, fury isn't part of it anymore. It's more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation.

That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.

Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She's been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, 'Lost in Translation.'

Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts act themselves senseless in 'August: Osage County,' and by the time they're finished, they've acted their movie senseless, too.

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.

I've decided 'Breaking Bad' may be one of the best TV shows ever, but I had to watch every last episode of the first four seasons to come to that conclusion.

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.

The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.

For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work.

Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.

David Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster.

Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule.