Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.

Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.

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

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

The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

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.

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.