It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination

Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse; it's just being enacted in a new way.

We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear.

There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.