The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

You can't base your life on the past or the present. You have to tell me about your future.

If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

I went to sexaholics anonymous for six months. For research. I wanted to see the structure of the groups, how they were conducted, and what the atmosphere was like, and also to be able to describe the people as human beings, rather than as the dirty jokes that they are in our culture.

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

The answer is there is no answer.