Quotes from Andrea Seigel

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.

Try to remember that decisions are made by individual, fallible personalities, not gods. It's hard. I know.

I understand how hard it is to force yourself to be someone different. By the end of high school, I had taken to doing my math homework up against a concealed wall during lunch because I was tired of socializing.

The first time I ever heard professional actors delivering lines that I wrote was completely surreal and was just a gigantic moment in my life. It was just a little bit mind-blowing and completely strange to have something that had been on my computer being said out loud.

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.

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

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.

What 'Survivor' is really about is the inescapability of your being yourself, even when you have told yourself you can be someone different for 30 days.

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.

As a kid, I was only allowed to watch a certain amount of television. But once I was old enough to own my own TV, I would stay up until 4:00 A.M. watching Home Shopping Network night after night. Soft-spoken women talked about the jewelry in very detailed, intricate, precious ways, and I loved it.

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.

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

I can be like that: forgetting how hard it was to do something after I'm past it.

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.

You don't ever know how happy you are until you remember how sad you once were and vice versa. Nothing is anything until I decide to hold nothing next to something, and declare that I see a difference.

I didn't like that look, and I didn't want it. But you can't just tell someone to knock off her look because she'll only give you another. And if you happen to raise your voice too much while asking her to stop looking, she'll hurry off to tell a friend about your behavior the second you walk out of earshot. And then that friend will come find you under some kind of pretense, wanting to decipher what's up your ass today.

And the sad happiness said, You know precisely when you're going to finish.

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.

As evidenced during my failed audition, I'm a thorough introvert who would completely hate living in a 'Real World' house. I would have taken my Ikea comforter to the confessional room and never come out.

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

TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.

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.

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

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.