Life's too short to drink crappy coffee and cry over boys who don't care.

When you start becoming a pop star, you think, Hold on a second, maybe my life is different now - maybe all these people that I thought of as celebrities are going to be normal, and when I walk into a room I'm going to be really cool and so is everyone else. But that's not what happens at all - I was awkward, and then I just retreated from any social engagement for about a year.

I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.

I'm used to writing short stories, which is primarily what I like to read.

I don't know whether we'll have another Michael Jackson or Elvis, because the world's too quick to level the playing field in that regard. For example, if Michael Jackson did the moonwalk for the first time now, and it debuted on Twitter, the third comment would probably be: "He's just walking backwards."

People think that atheists have nothing to live for, but that's not true - it's that we have nothing to die for.

What works for eating and swimming might work for reading and writing.