"Working with different people anyway is like life and meeting different people... as long as you can be empathetic, you can take a bit of them on and see what you can do to help their process. That said, my relationship with Woody Allen was trying to hang on his every word so that I could tell everybody what he said afterwards. But certainly, he was a very good example of somebody who you didn't hear talk above a very low volume for the entire time he was on-set."

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That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

— Jonathan Dee