The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault.

I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.