I come from a big family of storytellers and, growing up, I liked hearing about the years before I was born.

One thing that's always helped quell my writerly anxieties is seeking out interviews with writers I admire.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

An unforgettable experience happened on December 15, 1996 when I won the Supermodel contest while still in school. I was just seventeen years old then. Winning that competition was the turning point of my life. That's how I got into modeling and later started acting.

The way I see things, the way I see life, I see it as a struggle. And there's a great deal of reward I have gained coming to that understanding - that existence is a struggle.

I want life. I want to feel it and live it. I want, for as much of the time as possible in this blink-of-an-eye existence we have, to feel all that can be felt.