Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.

The only thing I might have noticed [and this is pretty anecdotal] is that there is some tendency to need to be taught that 'writing is rewriting' - maybe more of a sense than was pervasive 10 years ago that the first or second pass of a story is sufficient. That is an idea that is easily dislodged, but I suspect it might have something to do with the turnaround time re: blogging and so on - this sense that there is some essential truth about a first draft that one runs the risk of "ruining" by coming back to it.

Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.

I think it was a big revelation to me earlier in my life that people who appear to be evil are actually not. In other words, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Yuck, yuck, yuck, I'm gonna be evil." I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, "I think it's going to be a good day. I'm gonna do some really important work." And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.

When we talk about adversity, this is the moment when character really gets tested. When things aren't going the way you want and you can't see anyway that they're going to go the way you want. That's kind of when those old virtues really become valuable and vulnerable also.

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.

I think it's basically the same game, although with a public figure like [Donald] Trump I think you are bound to consider the public persona rather than the private one. At least that was the case with that piece of writing.