If you're on oxygen and low on oxygen or medication, restock on those items. If you're on a ventilator and need power have a buddy system set up.

We're not trying to scare anyone. We just want to refocus our attention. ... We've been so fixated on what's going on in the Gulf Coast and in Houston, but we don't want people not to be prepared here.

The land is so hard -- it's baked hard as a rock -- that a lot of rain is going to flow into the streets.

My favorite thing to do in L.A. is to be in a car with friends listening to music. The perfect time is twilight, when the setting sun is filtering through the palm trees. Back in the day, we'd be listening to the Vandals, X, or Farside. Now it would be L.A.-based bands like Dum Dum Girls, Foxygen, or Ty Segall.

Like my mother, I was always saying, 'I'll fix my life one day.' It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.

I've written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city's Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon.