I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.

As an adult, the only people who care about horror movies are academics. No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university.

Let's say Twitter existed during the Civil War. We would have a better understanding of people in the Confederacy who were against slavery, people in the North who actually felt we should just let the South be the South. Because the way it is now, it seems like we have this portrait where everybody in Georgia hated Yankees and everybody in the North was enlightened. That wouldn't seem as clear cut as it does now.

It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.