The way we still essentializ, we're constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can't have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.

You can't just make me different and then leave. You can't. You can't change me and make my whole life centered around you, then leave.

I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would agree that curiosity is not the most important human trait; the urge to collaborate is. Heck . . . only we have the ability to cooperate to make like online communities and space telescopes and imaginariums and movies. So the great thrill of this whole experience [my novel being made into a movie] for me was . .. .seeing humanity do what it's best at, which ultimately is not competing but cooperating.

You know what I hate? The outdoors. I mean, generally. I don't like outside. I'm an inside person. I'm all about refrigeration and indoor plumbing and Judge Judy.

Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them.

Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.

I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species.