I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college getting an entry level magazine job at 21 working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.

I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

Because at bottom I'm interested in fear and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction where you can enter people's heads.

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But you know I mean the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean the real story is actually probably pretty boring right? I mean we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction you can change what's crushing you.

As man sows so shall he reap. In works of fiction such men are sometimes converted. More often in real life they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.