Jeremy, Good luck on your first marriage.

Humor is necessary - it allows the reader to come up for air before dunking them under again. I need humor and I need it on the page to keep the reader going.

If I were president, I would turn the tables and allow the fetus to abort its mother.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.

I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.