When you never leave the literary biosphere, you forget how few people actually read books, and that in turn makes you start overestimating both your ability to make money and your relative renown, which has dangerous consequences: the first means you may end up in debt; the second means you may end up a horrid bore.

Health insurance, which is exceedingly difficult to secure as an individual in New York. Obamacare, while certainly better than nothing, is pretty awful, and if you have a complicated health history, as I do, you need premium insurance, which means private insurance. The challenge, though, is finding a company that will give you the privilege of paying up to $1,400 a month for it. When I didn't have a job, I spent more time thinking about insurance - not just paying for it, but securing it in the first place - than I wanted to.

We're living in a literary age, at least in America, that is marked by a sense of distance, a coolness, in all senses of that word. To be too obviously, unapologetically emotional is to risk being considered foolish, or at the very least not serious.

Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.

There are some writers who also enjoy being authors, and are good at it as well. There is nothing performative about writing, but there is about being a writer.

My father collected turtles when he was young. My parent's wedding album, there's two pictures of them getting married and the rest are just pictures of turtles. I remember they had Galapagos tortoises that they had somehow imported illegally and a bunch of other turtles too. I like the animals themselves. They're so self-possessed and self-contained and there's something wise and mysterious about them. I also like that they are prehistoric animals.

When you don't have to depend upon your creative work for money, you'll never really have to compromise... Knowing that is hugely liberating as well as artistically clarifying... Being practical about where your money comes from means you can be romantic about your writing... I believe that a healthy society is one that supports its artists, but I also know that that privilege, of being only an artist, is afforded to just a small number. Most of us have to find something else - or live a highly disciplined life, which I'm not willing to do.