Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness.

One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.

I consider most of the talent in the financial world to be suboptimal. It could be better placed earning its living in the real world.

My mom worked at McDonald's, and she decided she wanted to make more money, so she got into the management program at McDonald's. And that's how you move up the chain. It's not by demanding that minimum wage is raised; it's by actually acquiring the skills. That's the way that people get ahead in life.

Talking to hosts and asking them, 'What does Airbnb mean to you?'... I get amazingly heartfelt stories about the people that they met, about the money that they earned, about the mindset of empowerment they got through this and how they then applied that to their own business.

I think that a really good agent should be able to get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do.