I don't feel like I have a super straightforward relationship with the idea of fame. It makes me sort of level things out in my own brain almost immediately when I meet someone.
We are riveted by the soap operas of public lives. We admire the famous most for what makes them infamous: it reassures us that they are not better and no happier than all the people with their noses pressed hard against the glass.
I don't believe in the cult of personality, having my portrait hung all over the place like Ronald Reagan or Mao Tse-tung.
Celebrity is a pathological sickness of the culture. Narcissists on screen being consumed by narcissists off-screen.
There's so much focus on celebrity these days; we're in the Kardashian era, and it's slightly scary.
I think it's very dangerous, the idea of celebrity - you have to be constantly controversial to maintain the status of celebrity. Reality TV is the death of entertainment - it's just mindless TV but popular because of its voyeuristic nature, and people are very voyeuristic.
People now live their lives like an open wound to be famous - they do bad things because they're rewarded for it.
There is the cult of the actor and of the director, and there's even been the cult of the celebrity chef and gardener, but there has never been a cult of the screenwriter. But I'm happy about that because what I crave - in a completely venal way - is creative opportunities, not recognition.
My first book, 'Fast Forward', was about growing up in the shadow of Hollywood and how kids are affected by the culture of materialism and the cult of celebrity, and I've often felt the reason my work has an audience in the U.K. is because it's everything the British love to hate about the Americans.
I feel like sometimes, when I talk about 'Transparent,' I'm in a cult. And in some ways, I guess I sort of am, although it's a cult that pays me, and I don't pay it, so maybe that's a really good cult.
I'm a cult writer now. I have a cult readership.
