When I was writing Love and Lies, I was going over a lot of my old notes to see if there were any insights in them. I was obsessed with Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer. These are not guys that you want to go to for understanding the nature of love. They clearly didn't get it.

When I was writing Love and Lies, I was going over a lot of my old notes to see if there were any insights in them. I was obsessed with Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer. These are not guys that you want to go to for understanding the nature of love. They clearly didn't get it.

Unreflective self-deception leads people into hypocrisy and all sorts of moral failings. When you look at these people who are busy pontificating like I was a moment ago - Saint Clancy - those are the people that get into the most egregious kinds of moral problems.

I guess we romanticize the loser.

What is the most fascinating kind of self-deception to me, and a kind that isn't necessarily unhealthy, is what Friedrich Nietzsche called "strategic self-deception." The kind of self-deception that you can engage in with your eyes wide open. You do it because you say, "There's things that I couldn't accomplish without this kind of self-deception."

It's the same when you listen to any kind of successful athlete. My older brother has a useful name for them - he calls them lottery ticket careers. I are engaged in what he calls these lottery ticket careers. On the one hand it's very, very unlikely that you're ever going to hit it. On the other hand if you do hit it, you really hit it. You have to be engaged with it, though, maybe you're entire life. And if you never actually do hit it? You kind of jovially lie yourself along the way and recognize that it may produce things outside the hitting it kinds of goods, I suppose.

Both of us, me and Friedrich Nietzsche being writers, if we weren't capable of some strategic self-deception, we would have moved on to more lucrative careers long ago.