'The Client List' is my baby. I always tell people, 'It took nine months to put this project together because it is my baby.' And, it really did take that long!

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

Although some people are under the impression that John and I spent our entire year-and-a-half together in L.A., we spent only about seven months there, from September 1973, with many long breaks back in New York.

I do think people would be surprised to know that journalists from various news outlets are in this together in many ways in terms of these long hours and in terms of really sharing a desire to get information to the American people.

It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people either pursue in years of futile search or dismiss as a fantasy at the outset: the missing half of ourselves. The real thing.

I had a girlfriend when I was about 13 but we didn't stay together for very long and I've not really been out with many people since. I've still never had a serious girlfriend but I would happily go out with someone if the right girl came along.

But so long as we can keep this crew of fantastic people together and can continue to make real breakthrough films in this category, as well as characters that stay true to what we've done in this first film, I'd be more than happy to be a part of it.

I build duets into bigger works. I like to see people working together. What we call a giant solo in my company is about four bars long while twenty other people are doing something dynamically. I like the charge that is set up by a lot of people doing something.

I'm always depressed when a book ends, because those are my friends for however long the book takes to write. Since I spend so many hours with these fictional people, I sometimes see them more than my real friends. And then they're gone, and we'll never be together like that again.

I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

What I think we need to do to engage the American people in a conversation about entitlement reform is to have a bipartisan group of people who come together and put every solution on the table, every alternative on the table. And then we ought to engage in a long conversation with the American people so they understand the choices.

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