Jami Attenberg

Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?

Cooking skills aside, my mother is an exceptional nurturer.

People are branded as either 'fat' or 'skinny' from an early age. You sort of never shake it, even if you end up losing weight.

I won't go anywhere near the new Times Square. It's seizure-inducing.

My parents are still married. They don't weigh 350 pounds; they go to the gym all the time.

Many online journals get the most hits of the day during the lunch hour.

You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'

What I try very hard to do is have an hour or so in the morning when I leave the house and don't have my phone with me. I'll go sit in a cafe and read and handwrite in my notebook and not be facing a screen. My head will be clear. I will be able to hear myself think. Because honestly for the rest of the day it's just screens, screens, screens.

I am not one of those people who string their exes along. Instead, I run and hide: under the covers, behind my computer screen, on opposite coasts of the country.

I always tell people this when they're looking for an agent - they should love your work. You are entitled to work with someone who believes in you. Why do business with someone who is ambivalent about you and your art?

Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.

Social media can connect you with other people in so many wonderful ways - but it can also make you really sick of yourself.