I'm a worst-case scenario person. I'm only interested in a story because I kind of go, like a magnet, to the worst thing that can happen.

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

Life is an X-rated soap opera.

You can't learn everything you need to know legally.

It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.

I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.

We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.