In The Interestings I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.

The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star.

I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway.

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it.