We've become a nation of indoor cats, he'd said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren't the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.

It's so easy to print in the Midwest. You're saving months in shipping and customs, so we have started printing a number of books there.

Loneliness is just a thing that I'm not personally interested in. So far, it hasn't been on my docket of things to write about.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made.

A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We've turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it's much easier to access a person's location than it is to ask - or to trust.