Someone asked me when it was that I felt confident enough in my writing that I could rely on it as a career. The truth is, I never have. I'm always on the hunt for second, third, or fourth careers. Private detective and cinematographer were previous career choices, but now that I'm older I think I'd be a good portrait painter, rug merchant, or florist.

I had been going out to Orient for several years.

There’s a great scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974] that I’m obsessed with: Sally is being chased by Leatherface with a chainsaw... And she runs into thorn bushes. And she’s getting tangled up in it because she’s running fast... But Sally needs to move slowly in order to get through the bushes - she will get farther faster by going slowly because her hair and clothes won’t get tangled and caught. There’s something really beautiful about understanding that, while someone’s chasing you with a chainsaw, you have to move more slowly in order to get away.

You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle.

Now we're in an age of singles. It's actually always been more about singles for most of music history.

Safety, reputation, their lives, their friends, and their world. Writers typically try to avoid that because it's not expedient.

I've never even done a residency.