When you adapt a book, you really have to cut it to the essence.

I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

Every time a crime was committed by a Muslim, that person's faith was mentioned, regardless of its relevance. When a crime is committed by a Christian, do they mention his religion? ... When a crime is committed by a black man, it's mentioned in the first breath: 'An African American man was arrested today...' But what about German Americans? Anglo Americans? A white man robs a convenience store and do we hear he's of Scottish descent? In no other instance is the ancestry mentioned.

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.