I'd read an enormous amount but had spent so much time in my own head that I didn't have extensive social skills. Suddenly I was in this world where I was surrounded by these incredibly polished and wealthy kids who had gone to prep schools, and I felt daunted by them. I don't think people were aware of how full of anxiety I was... For a long time I felt like I was living in a place where I shouldn't have been.

The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.

You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom.

I know a lot of people don't listen to music when they're writing because it distracts them, but for me it's almost a way to get into the self-hypnotic state that I need to be in to write.

I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once -- I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth. It's sort of freeing: I can say I'm abandoning this thing that I hate forever and I'm moving on to something that's good. I'll find that I'll go back to [the other project] in a day or a week and like it again. But that moment of wanting to trash something -- that Virginia Woolf moment when you have to be stopped from filling your pocket with stones -- comes pretty regularly for me. Switching is probably a good thing.

I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.