Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.

I love things that are brave enough to be nakedly about what our lives are actually built of, when you're wild about someone, or you love something, or you're a fool, or you embarrass yourself. And I don't think the answer is cynicism. Cynicism is not the cure for sentimentality. Cynicism is its own form of sentimentality. For example, I tried to watch Breaking Bad. After three episodes, I thought, I don't like this guy. I don't care about him. But you can see why people tell themselves that they think this is real. But real doesn't mean bad.

Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a way, legitimately, to maintain your sense of specialness and difference? And how do you express that? Does it just become a kind of kitsch? You can say this of gay people, but it's true for Jewish people, Italian Americans, everyone who deals with it. It's a question of assimilation. How can you be assimilated and special at the same time?

I was interested in all kinds of things, whether it be Avatar, Mad Men, Troy, 300, Battlestar Gallactica, or the poems of Horace and Sappho. I always joke about this to my students, who can't quite wrap their mind around the fact that you can have a Ph.D in classics, but not do that full time. I never wanted to write anything with footnotes for the rest of my life. I always think of what I do as the kind of conversation you'd have with somebody, like a good friend, when you've gone and seen a movie together, and you come home and you start talking about it.

I find that readers are very interested in how things are translated. I just turned in the first part of this father-son Odyssey, and there is a part when I digress and explain that the name Odysseus is related to the word for pain. Like "-odyne" in the word "anodyne," pain. It's the same, "-odyne" as in Odysseus. He's the man who both suffers endlessly, in trying to get home, but also inflicts a lot of suffering on everyone he visits.

The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.

Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.