People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Now that I'm almost forty, I look back at some of the decisions I made when I was younger - decisions that I thought of as courageous, or generous, or otherwise befitting a writer; befitting someone who had taken it as their life's goal to understand the human condition - and I wish I could go back in time and be like, "Hey, you don't actually have to do that - you're allowed to look out for yourself a little bit."

It's really a trade-off: you're always having to decide whether you're going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity - or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you sound like you're talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.

Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing about real people. In nonfiction, you can only say so much about the people you interact with. After all, they're actual people, their version of their story trumps yours. In a novel, you can build a character, using certain parts or impressions of someone you know, and guessing or inventing others, without having to worry that your guesses or memories or inventions are wrong.

I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth.

I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I would say to that is, we tend to think of historical periods and historical mores as ending a lot more concretely than they do. Like, in an Austen novel, there are lots of reasons - cultural, moral, religious - why the characters don't have sex during courtship. Maybe, even though those reasons have kind of expired, historically, they're still around in some sense.