Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.