The creepy thing about battle is you always feel alone.
I write the books I want to read. I'm interested in seeing what happens with this book in the marketplace.
It's through the voice that I tend to figure out the character (and through dialogue that I come to understand other characters).
I think that most successful artists - not always, but a lot of them, in any field - have business savvy as well and have some sense of marketing acumen. I think the key is to be good enough at it that it doesn't overwhelm your aesthetic interests, but have just enough that you make smart decisions.
We spend more time with our coworkers than we do with our loved ones, and yet we don't have that many novels on the subject. We have far more novels about families bickering at Thanksgiving and not enough about the day before Thanksgiving at the office. If we lived in, say, Romania, maybe a workplace job might not be as important to the cultural discussion. But we live in America, where work is crucially important and capitalism drives everything we do.
People talk about Obama in the same way 12-year-olds talk about Bieber, and speculate about what he and Michelle are like behind closed doors the same way those 12-year-olds wonder what Justin and Selena are like.
For each of my novels, I've had something of a eureka moment of deciding what world I want to set it in - Wall Street, the pop-music industry, Harvard - and what the very vague contours of the narrative might be (which typically get changed a lot through the writing process).
The greatest pleasures of love are inseparable from its greatest pains: Love has the face of a goddess, but the talons of a lion.
Two things to remember in life: take care of your thoughts when you are alone, and take are of your words when you are with people.
Nine times out of 10, the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels.
Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us–to haunt our thoughts long after we've faced them.