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

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

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.

Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.

"Unputdownable" is, I suppose, something we all dream of, maybe without knowing it. I realized, some time ago, that a novel can hold a lot, and it made sense that this one was not of the sleek and economical variety, but instead the "full" type. Novel as piñata. And the reader does the whacking. I had a central idea, which is to look at what happens to talent over time.

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.

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