I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.

Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.

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

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.

A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.