I don't know how people do this job collaboratively if they don't really get along. You're spending all day every day for months and years on end with somebody.

After you do this for a while, you get used to things not working the way you want them to. There's a job you want, and you don't get it. There's a movie you'd like to get made, and it doesn't get made. You become inured to it.

If a superhero knocks over a building, and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they're not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it's the worst thing we've ever seen. I totally understand where that visceral reaction comes from. I have that same reaction.

We know that the elements in play in a show like 'Confederate' are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called 'Westeros,' which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show.

What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.'

The relationship between husband and wife should be one of closest friends.

Those of Manhattan are the brokers on Wall Street and they talk of people who went to the same colleges; those from Queens are margin clerks in the back offices and they speak of friends who live in the same neighborhood.

Everything I write is meant to share what I'm struggling with. I hope that it helps other people. I benefit from that a great deal because I always hear new ideas from my readers. It's a very symbiotic relationship.