But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

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

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

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.

And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?