Someone asked me when it was that I felt confident enough in my writing that I could rely on it as a career. The truth is, I never have. I'm always on the hunt for second, third, or fourth careers. Private detective and cinematographer were previous career choices, but now that I'm older I think I'd be a good portrait painter, rug merchant, or florist.

You sit at a fashion show in another country and you watch all of these paparazzi swarm around a celebrity, only they're a local celebrity, maybe a soap opera star, so you don't have any idea who they are, you just know they're famous to a bunch of stunned Italians. It's weird, because when you can't identify who a celebrity is, they can just look like overslicked stand-ins. That might sound awful, but what I mean is, when you think about most actresses, even in Hollywood, they really aren't that fascinating or glamorous in their own right once you strip away the flashbulbs.

Safety, reputation, their lives, their friends, and their world. Writers typically try to avoid that because it's not expedient.

It's just as political, what you do in the bedroom is just as political as what you do in public.

The death drive is parasitic. It runs off of other drives, leeching off of them.

My strength is character. I'm pretty good at building walking-talking humans with brains like beehives.

Why I love chess and tennis - the volleying aspect, and the fact that your competitors' reactions and motivations and bluffs come into the game itself.