My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They're generally charitable people. They're interested in the world. They're curious, they're empathetic. They understand suffering. They don't turn away from that. But what they do is essentially useless. Except for the sake of the thing itself.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

We're no longer dealing in the world of the real in a truthful way. We're interacting with each other in shiny homepages. I don't think that makes for honest communication.

I think if there hadn't been the one passage of the book that mostly abandons the humor, and focuses very intently on one person's struggle with cancer, it wouldn't have been a critical success. So that was a very deliberate decision, to say "Well, if you think it's all fun and games, it's not." So that was my approach: We're going to have as much fun as I can possibly provide, but the serious things that might normally pass by you are not going to be lost.

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.