Andrea Seigel

“When I left for college, I told myself that this was a chance for reinvention. No one on the other side of the country knew that I was an introvert, so maybe if I tried not acting like an introvert, I wouldn't be one.”

“There's nothing essentially romantic about things like roses or jewelry. Romance starts as some blank concept, and then you just fill it in with objects so you have something to point to when you want to make it real.”

“For me, one of the most beautiful and rewarding aspects of serial reality TV is that characters can move freely along a spectrum of heroism and villainy.”

“'Real Housewives of New Jersey' has taught me more about the nature of a vacuum in space than any of the demonstrations in my high school AP physics textbook.”

“Louis CK knows that just because a joke is using space as a resource instead of something to be crammed like a hamper, this doesn't mean a story isn't happening.”

“Because teenagers don't have adult responsibilities yet, you can create your own drama, and it's a universe of your own emotions.”

“I was an anxious kid. I worried about getting homework finished, even back when homework didn't count for anything.”

“I'm definitely very interested in doing female narrators that aren't typically feminine or emotional or soft - especially teenage girls - because I have such a hard time relating to so many of them that I read. They feel psychologically cuter to me than I ever was.”

“The second book was probably the result of the relationship I was in at the time. We were only going to be compatible for a minute, and I think we both knew it. It's like how you can be a different person on vacation, but you know all along you're just visiting that mindset.”

“My feeling for reality TV isn't ironic, guilty, or apologetic. Reality TV is one of the few remaining modes of popular entertainment in which characterization is permitted as plot.”

“I watched the first episode of 'Survivor' in the spring of 2000, thinking I would hate it. My natural inclination steers me toward the indoors not only in my actual life but also in the settings of the entertainment I read and watch.”

“Irvine is such a safe, stable, planned community, and I'm a person who has a lot of inner longing for drama and romance. So I think in some way the structure of Irvine made me more creative because I had these boundaries, and I thought outside them.”

“I lean toward anything with a dark sense of humor. And since I've been out of school, the majority of my books have been contemporary; basically, I like my characters to have electricity - even better, a TV.”

“Are you in pain?' I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.”

“From the first Lauren Luke tutorial I watched, I was completely taken with her.”

“I've never read any of the '50 Shades of Grey' books because the Internet pre-educated me about the 'my inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves' material.”

“I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.”

“Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.”

“I've dreamed of having my French bulldog become a bestselling children's heroine.”

“I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.”