You’re making sixteen-year-olds read a book about twenty-something life experiences, and they’re just not there yet. They don’t understand what its like to have fallen in love with somebody, or go out there and trying to make something of yourself. You forget it’s a book about adults, I also think it’s hard to really appreciate it also because you just analyze it to death [in high school] – everything was a symbol. You’re not really looking at Nick, and Daisy, and Gatsby, you’re looking at the symbol of this, the symbol of that.
And that was how I kind of thought literature was supposed to be. You know if you’re going to make a book, you’re going to make it f*cking full of symbols. [laughs]