Makeup is something that a female has to reckon with every single day. Whether you wear it or don't, you're always making decisions about wearing it or not, or how you're wearing it, and what that means.

Both my parents are professors, and I never really saw people do any other jobs, so I didn't really know how to want a different kind of job.

When I started binge-watching TV, when that became a thing due to Netflix a few years ago, the first thing I watched was 'Lost.' It was summer break from grad school, and I watched it all in a row, like as many hours a day as I could, as though I were clocking in at a job.

Sometimes you go for weeks without writing successfully, and you don't feel like a writer anymore. When friends ask me how my week was or how I'm doing, I think back on it, and I've just been by myself. Like, I'm just a sketch.

Beloved Renegade' is a meditation on Walt Whitman, on tenderness, on dying.

The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.

I got plenty of grief for 'Blackwater,' because in the books, there's this huge chain across the harbor that features prominently in the battle. And we simply weren't able to do it with our budget and do it any justice, so we had to lose it.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.