People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.

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

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

Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.

But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.

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.

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