MARY H.K. CHOI

I love New York, but sometimes New York is so mean to you.

By the time you're in your 30s, unless somebody makes the god-awful decision to gift you with a cooking class or salsa lessons, it may have been a while since you learnt something new.

The thing about leaving New York is that you can come back.

Instagram is not a place for tone or irony.

If there was a button that I could push that would agog my brain to the level that I felt first seeing 'Avatar' in its entirety and another one for food pellets, I would die of starvation.

In New York, you collect a thousand encounters a year, a passel of handshakes, a zillion air-kisses, and boatloads of business cards that you pitch into your purse and eventually deposit your chewing gum into. Amid this break-neck montage of glancing contacts, I'm tormented by the constant thrumming fear of being fingered as a flake.

Pirates, me hearties, are the Patronus of the freelancer.

I love small-business owners, and I actually love the idea of vintage clothing, but I don't get when they pretend that the Internet doesn't exist or that other customers have never been to the whole rest of the country where you can rummage around and buy the same dang belt for a buck and a half.

The thing that I find interesting about teens now is that no matter how desperate we seem to be taxonomically 'othering' them, for one reason or another - because the Internet, because whatever - I feel like a lot of the benchmarks and the experiences are, you know, same for teens through time immemorial.

You always feel like a hack and a fraud when you're writing. It's just how it goes.

I would never give up 'The Wire,' 'Breaking Bad,' and 'Game of Thrones.' I'm grateful for all these expensive, excellent, graphically ambitious programs.

I'm pretty sure I peaked at 15.

Have passion, yes, but acknowledge that side projects are still work. They shake things up, just like switching up your workout helps you stay one step ahead of your torpid metabolism. They scramble the synapses.

Even the coolest jobs get stultifying with repetition, and the only way to break that cycle is to bring another job into the mix.

When I was five, I compound-fractured my arm, pulverising my elbow.

Never hold up your entire group of friends in real life trying to capture a perfect Instagram pose. Nobody cares.

I roll my eyes at the grandstanding blowhards who have 'fixed' themselves, but I keep up with the gizmos and apps that track people's various rhythms. I'm no lifelogger or body-hacker, but I'm curious, and I want to be in-tune enough to know what's really the matter so I can level up and be at my most awesome.

You are overwhelmed, overscheduled, and dejected because you keep trying to have it all - or at least most of it. You want a fulfilling job and personal life, and it's not working. The way out? Work more.

I have horrible shoe hang-ups. Particularly when it comes to flats.

Eventually, I just want to write wavy little short stories.

There's a really generous readership with YA.

I find texting to be kind of a safe space.

Wikipedia's a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in 'The Professor and the Madman,' which outlines James Murray's mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.

Do you know why we pay trainers and nutritionists? Because having to muster interest in the minor successes of someone else's journey toward pedestrian-ass healthiness is taxing and should be compensated.

When you have tools with which to stalk everyone all the time, the most seemingly aloof person wins.