For me, there's a bad year of getting started on something. You write bad stuff and it's awkward to throw it out, and you wait around to get some good ideas that maybe do come or don't come. Until eventually you get the voice and autonomy of the characters, the characters have personality, and they sort of pick up the weight and put it on their shoulders. That's when it becomes a little more fun.

Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.

Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.

I'm for people clinging. I'm pro-clinging.

There's a big difference between having relatives who have money and actually having it yourself. Just because you have a cousin who has a lot of money doesn't mean he shares it with you. Or that you'd ask him for a loan.

I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.

I decided the moment I graduated from college that I would never wear blue jeans again. And I have never worn blue jeans again.