I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.

It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.

It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.

In terms of e-books, though, I haven't quite gotten to the bottom of it yet, but for some reason everybody I know seems to want to engage me on that topic, or convert me. I think there are a lot of people who just want to hear me embrace e-books or finally say, 'OK, I bought an iPad and it's awesome!" There are a lot of people who would get a kick out of it, that's for sure.

It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

I guess there's just a part of me that's not very enthusiastic about finding myself ten years from now halfway through a story that may or may not be any good.

I think it's harder for each generation. Even I just feel completely separate from teenagers today who have access to the Internet. And I'm amazed that this interest in video games has never gone away. It just keeps growing.