The big thing in my family growing up is that everybody had to play a musical instrument. We were like the von Trapps.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.

My parents were very permissive when it came to animals. As long as we earned the money to buy them and built whatever structure it was they were going to live in, we could have any kind of pet we wanted. They would have let us have a rhinoceros if we could have afforded it.

I'm a leukemia survivor, and I recall during my darkest days in the hospital when my friends would come to see me, especially the male friends - they had certain mortality issues with their visit.

Death just comes, not happiness. Because when you're trying to find happiness, you're trying to navigate a very, very murky minefield of distractions, of disappointments, of deceptions. That's why you have to work on happiness.

The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it's kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing.

I am interested in struggle - between our hearts and our head, between principle and desire - and one of those struggles is with mortality; and no one at all is immune to it, which makes it even more interesting to me. Some people fall in love, some don't. Some sky dive, some don't. Everyone who lives, ages.