I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time - well, it doesn't always work. Still, no matter what, I'm always looking at the form and addressing it, not ignoring it.

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.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.

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