Camille Perri

“I wrote 'The Assistants' while I was the Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief of 'Esquire.'”

“The queer community deserves a happy ending just as much as anybody else.”

“Word of mouth will trump media attention every time.”

“I'm big on coffee shops. Fortunately, I live in Brooklyn where there are many to choose from.”

“I think the skyrocketing cost of a college education has placed it in the sphere of being a luxury-priced necessity.”

“My favorite lesbian romance of all time is the 1999 movie 'But I'm a Cheerleader,' starring Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall. RuPaul is also in it; so is the brilliant Melanie Lynskey.”

“'When Harry Met Sally' will endure. It will be the standard rom-com that others will improvise on for years to come.”

“When I read Alison Bechdel's 'Fun Home,' it was the first time I saw drawings that looked like me.”

“As our nation's student debt crisis has reached a breaking point, we've been hearing lots of talk about student loan forgiveness. It's taken me 20 years to forgive myself for my loan - and just as long to pay it off.”

“Nora Ephron's 'When Harry Met Sally' is a classic.”

“I'm not sure if it's easier to address tough themes through humor, but I do think it's more fun and makes such themes easier to digest for the reader.”

“I like clothes. I like fashion, particularly men's fashion. Both my father and my grandmother on my mother's side were tailors, so I think it's in my blood.”

“You can get away with making some extremely bold statements by Trojan Horsing them into a narrative via comedy.”

“I loved those movies from the eighties, movies like 'Working Girl,' 'Nine to Five,' 'Outrageous Fortune,' 'The Heat,' 'Bridesmaids,' 'Pitch Perfect,' and others.”

“They say you don't want to know how sausage is made. Book coverage is like sausage in that way: better not to know exactly how the gatekeepers of mainstream media choose which books to crown as must-reads each season - just swallow it down with a cold beer and call it a night.”

“One of my favorite things is to first read a novel and then see the movie. I enjoy picturing the characters and then later, seeing them on the screen, comparing how they're different.”

“Clothing reveals what a character is trying to project as well as what they're giving away about themselves without even realizing it: their socioeconomic class; their confidence level; their vulnerabilities.”

“When I wrote 'The Assistants,' I knew very much that I wanted to write about income inequality and student loan debt and the gender wage gap, but I wanted to put it in a really slick, fun package. That book ended up being described as a socially conscious novel in chick-lit clothing.”

“I can't tell you how much debt I took on to attend New York University because, at the time, I didn't care to notice. And besides, what teenager has a clue about interest rates? What I can tell you is that by my mid-20s, I owed somewhere around $50,000.”

“Before my mother died, I was supposed to go to the local university, where I'd applied early decision. It was the same school my two older sisters had graduated from, which had been the sole criteria for choosing it.”