It's always surprised me that mainstream America had the good taste to like R.E.M. It doesn't have the digestible quality the general public tends to look for in its favorite musicians.

I like the idea of the book being wiser than the person who wrote it. None of the novels I've written are direct transcriptions of me blathering over dinner with a glass of wine in my hand. I don't hold any illusion of those conversations being of particular value. The books, though, are - I hope - bigger than my opinions, investigations that go beyond my own intellect or wit.

It's just as political, what you do in the bedroom is just as political as what you do in public.

My strength is character. I'm pretty good at building walking-talking humans with brains like beehives.

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.

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.

Going out into the country after living in the city is a loss of control.