Inevitably the real self does come out. Maybe we put parts of ourselves that we actually don’t manifest in reality into fiction—it’s such an unconscious process.

“One thing I like about the Aliens series is the fact of its many, many, pregnant men.”

“I have yearned for the right to have nothing to say, and the confidence to say it anyway.”

I thought about the elements of a thriller, as a genre: danger, death, uncertainty, violence, crime, corruption. Certainly all of these things are in the ether as we speak; and suspense, well, we are all undeniably suspended in some way right now.

I’ve never had an office, apart from the sad, windowless closet I occupied as a grad student. I don’t own a desk. Some days I work at my kitchen table, but more often I sit on my couch or in bed with my computer on my lap. Music, rather than location, is what grounds me as I write.

Lillian Ross does not reveal how the adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage will pan out until practically the very end, at which point, the plot reasserts itself and what had seemed a sideshow attraction rears into view as the true climax of Picture.