Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

I'm a romantic; you have to be to marry four times.

There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.

You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why.

I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.

Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.