There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you're only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer's power and unfair to the reader.

And why the hell should you do a really hard, important job that you don't want to do? That has extremely high stakes? That just blows my mind.

What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that's such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing.

We've never been in a time where mothers - parenthood, but particularly motherhood - is so fetishized.

No matter where they are or who they're with, dogs are incapable of being anything but themselves. Show me a dog that puts on airs or laughs politely at an unfunny joke and I'll show you a human in a dog costume, possibly one owned and licensed by the Walt Disney Company.

As soon as I accepted that I am this kind of writer and I happen to live here, and stopped going to meetings and stopped beating myself up because I wasn't making a ton of money writing for some stupid sitcom, I felt really at home.

I mean, being provincial is a privilege in a way. Also people in New York think everybody interacts because they all take the subway. "Oh, I see all these different people! All these different walks of life on the subway." Well, they're not coming to your dinner party. Certainly, in small-town Nebraska, everyone indeed did mix together.