“The penguins that spent most of their time fighting were the ones with no chicks...It's like they're supposed to be taking care of their chicks. But because they don't have any, they have nothing to do with all their energy. So they just pick fights.”

“I think because I try to keep things as real as I can, or I try to start from a place of reality, I almost don't have the imagination to write a book that's not set where I am.”

“Creating art is painful. It takes time, practice, and the courage to stand alone.”

“There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.”

“After decades spent in rewrite rooms surrounded by other shouting writers, I discovered that I work best alone. I like being in charge of my time, working out the problems according to my own rhythms and being able to nap. That's a big one, the napping on demand!”

“My strength as a TV writer was my total lack of interest in television.”

“I quickly realized that shopping on Amazon had made the idea of parking my car and going into a store feel like an outrageous imposition on my time and good nature.”

“My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.”

“I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.”

“And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.”

“People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”