I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Chemistry is one of these crazy things you can't teach or learn or you can't fake. You go in hoping it will work, hope that you will connect with the other actors. I was fortunate on 'Modern Family' and 'The Procession.' They are great people, very easy to like.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.