Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

I don't feel like I'm self-conscious about what's next. I don't care. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I know what it's like not to be.