I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer.

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter.

I can look back and recognize the things I've done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule-breaking, et cetera. Sometimes the wrongness was even clear at the time, though not as clear as it is now. But I did these things because I felt the pull of a trajectory, a sense of experience piling up the way it does as you turn the pages of a novel. I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. I am the same person. I would do it all again.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated. Any time people have an argument about them, they're arguing about something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way that has to do with style or substance or actual content of books.

Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.

I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work.