Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation.

I think the responsibility of running a huge business, which happens if you become a successful designer, probably makes you more careful.

I think part of a hero construct is overcoming loss, or being abandoned, or having to make your own way in the world.

I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.

I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that's how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little - silent, silver, endless, and dreamy.

When I was a kid, Halloween was strictly a starchy-vegetable-only holiday, with pumpkins and Indian corn on the front stoop; there was nothing electric, nothing inflatable, nothing with latex membranes or strobes.

The one thing I've discovered about social media is that people love answering questions. In fact, it sometimes feels like at any given moment, millions of people are online who have been waiting for exactly the question you fire off.