I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling.

I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.

I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.

There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.

Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.