I started writing one afternoon when I was twenty, and ever since then I have written every day. At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking.

I was first published in the newspaper put out by School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a student. I wince to read that story nowadays, but I published it with an odd photo I'd found in a junk shop, and at least I still like the picture. I had a few things in the school paper, and then I got published in a small literary magazine. I hoped I would one day get published in The New Yorker, but I never allowed myself to actually believe it. Getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would.

I never got the idea of a punishing God, just a really boring one. To see people growing up in the Carolinas who were Baptist, I knew there were others who felt God was going to send them to hell for any little thing, but not me.

When someone tell me they illegally downloaded one of my audiobooks I think, Thanks a lot, Pal. When someone tells me they checked my book out of the library, I'm delighted. I've always been a big library user, and feel a kinship with others who do the same thing.

College is the best thing that can ever happen to you," my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they're not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two houres and they go over the edge.