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.

New York is such a special place. It's really intense for people because they live here when they're young. On top of the energy of the city there's a visceral experience a lot of people have because it's a time in their lives where they're just absorbing a lot. Things take on a significance that they might not otherwise.

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.

There may well be a few extremists out there somewhere calling for a militant, women-only utopia, but why should this be the definition of 'feminist' when it's already the definition of 'silly'?

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.

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.

Being in the entertainment industry in L.A. is the equivalent to being in the publishing industry in New York. You don't ever have to hangout with anybody else.