Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.

I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.

Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way.

When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.'

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.

The hardest thing about the WWE is the travel.

Through my work as a nutritionist and trainer to celebrity clients, I've had amazing opportunities to travel the world. In my experience, I made what seemed to be a remarkable discovery: the farther I travel from the U.S., the easier it is to find foods that are both nourishing and slimming.