I like change. I've never really had much consistency in my life, you know, from everyday work to my living situation to whether or not I'm going to be in L.A. The one constant thing in my life is my friends and family, which is all I need

We've come under the influence of television, where in all honesty we can follow a show that could just get cancelled midway through the season and the entire plotline never resolves itself.

My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession.

We lost so many talented artists and writers from the generations before ours that we're really lacking older figureheads.

I'm ultimately not so much of a professor as a progresser. And I'm ready to move away from what I consider to be this weird mid-century dream that I feel pulls us as a country, and us as a culture, backward.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

I smoke cigarettes when I write, which is disgusting, but it really helps me.