If my work was good enough, I would never have to do publicity.

On the one hand, people think they own kids; they feel that they have the right to tell the kids what to do. On the other hand, people envy kids. We'd like to be kids our whole lives. Kids get to do what they do. They live on their instincts.

At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about "Between the Acts" and "Mrs. Dalloway'' but mostly about "To the Lighthouse." With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable." That's when I decided I should never write again.

I'm always trying to perfect the romantic comedy, though.

Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do.

I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."

Our country was founded on a distrust of government. Our founding fathers gave power to the people to keep an eye on government. So when politicians say, 'Trust me,' they're actually being very un-American.