Christine Sneed quotes:

Jealousy is a potent emotion, of course, and Facebook, texting, email, fan Web pages... In theory, being someone like George Clooney's or Halle Berry's paramour - woo hoo - how great would that be? But wait a minute... er, no, probably kind of a nightmare.

Thirty years ago, the Pandora's box of the Internet wasn't yet a fact of life, and celebrities inhabited a more remote, hard-to-reach plane.

I keep a couple of notebooks too into which I record ideas for story titles or characters or situations, and these notes help me quite a bit when I'm feeling at loose ends and not sure of what to work on next.

The effects of fame on the not-famous people who are close to a celebrity - this is definitely a topic that continues to interest me.

Mostly what ends up inspiring me and affecting my work are books by authors that I love.

I don't know if make a conscious effort to vary the characters and subjects that I write about, but I do find myself keeping track of ideas that come along, as probably most writers do, and whatever seems most interesting to me when I flip through my notes before I begin a new story is usually what I will try to write about next.

Unless I'm writing trying to write about a historical figure, I don't really set out to read or research with a specific topic in mind.

I think it takes a very generous and tolerant non-famous partner to stick with the famous person, especially if s/he wasn't famous when they first got together. And add to it the fact that the Web makes it extremely easy to meet admirers... well, there are a lot of temptations to be ignored, or else embraced.

I think that under ordinary circumstances (i.e., neither person is famous), it's already hard enough to make a long-term romantic relationship work, but add fame to the calculus.

Sometimes I do work on a longer manuscript in tandem with one or two shorter pieces - whether it's a short story or an essay (though I don't write many of the latter).

One thing the passage of time has shown me is that you never know how you'll behave in a situation until you're in that situation yourself.

Men might be chastised for being promiscuous, but I think they're more likely to be given a pass, due to a "men will be men" attitude that still prevails in the Western world. They don't usually experience anything like the virulent shaming and verbal abuse that women who are sexually adventurous are sometimes prone to experiencing.

Tangentially, Americans, despite many of us being prone to sometimes-eyebrow-raising disclosures about our private lives on social media, still retain what I think of as reactionary views about sexuality and intimacy.

So much of what determines our happiness, I believe, is who we choose as our intimates.