I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.

The worst thing you can have as an actor is too big an ego. It just kills creativity.

If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.

I call my tiki bar my tiki office, even though I also entertain out here all the time. This beautiful, open-air space is such a creative environment for me. It's where my writing partner and I wrote much of the script for a Mamas and Papas biopic that's in the works, and where I have my meetings.