I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a glossy brochure.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

I think back when I was kind of a crappy writer, I really did know my time was better spent working and having adventures and seeing the world.

I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.

People seem to want to read more nonfiction than fiction.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.