Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

Time is the most extraordinary gift for friendship. You'll get to eat your meals together and study together; in some cases you'll even sleep in the same room. You'll have time to waste on each other. You'll find out every single thing you have in common and still have time to catalogue all of your differences. Don't underestimate the vital necessity of friendship in your life because it is the thing that will sustain you later, when there will be considerably less time.

I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

I always feel it is a shortcoming of mine as a reader and as a writer that I frankly need to like somebody.