I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important.

Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this.

We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything.

Sacrifice doesn't really exist on a national level anymore and that's a pretty new thing - most people aren't engaged nationally in some form of service and that changes the way you think about people in your country; you kind of think of them at a distance. And so there's that shift away from some sort of sacrifice - thinking of yourself as the most important thing in the world versus thinking of yourself as some sort of a whole.

[Sex] is really awkward. You know you have expectations and then it's this great moment of connection and it's a surprise. But that's what so exciting about it is that sense of surprise.

I'm kind of interested in learning to learn and grow and challenge myself. I think I've been very fortunate in that my books are pretty different from one novel to the next. There's a lot of things that are similar but in terms of tone and the scale and how they interact with history and just the different styles as well.

Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.