If you have a great characters, you can always have your character do nothing or do something stupid, and people will still follow them, because they're so real and so tangible.

I've hated cockroaches my entire life.Tweeting jokes about it helps me cope, in a way. I'm not as jumpy killing cave crickets as I used to be. I still jump plenty though.

On the Internet, Spencer Hall at Everyday Should Be Saturday is the best writer in the universe. He's very funny. They're jokes about college football, but they come from somebody who's clearly smarter than the rest of us; it's always fun to get your jokes from someone who's a genius.

The idea for me came when I was watching a 60 Minutes segment about resveratrol, the chemical in red wine that lets you live longer, supposedly. And they were like, "Who knows, maybe one day it will help to cure aging." And I thought, "Well, if they did that, we'd all kill each other." And then I laughed, and then I thought about how precisely that would happen. That's how the book came to be.

I found that life for me gets a lot more serious as you get older. You start off young and happy and smiling and "Wooo! I'm having fun!" And then you get married, and that's very serious, and you have kids, and that's very, very serious. So as you get older, you start thinking about passing away, and that becomes extremely serious.

I posted some story about the Arizona State baseball coach getting into a fight with an autograph hound, and it was a disastrous thing. The guy rescinded his story. It proved to me that I'm not cut out to be a proper journalist. I'm much better sitting around and making fun of journalists and telling them what terrible journalists they are than being an actual journalist.

I think it's the next thing, getting out of the comfort-zone readership, that at some point you have to try and break out of that and see if you can go in new directions. I wanted to do something that felt a lot bigger than a book that's going to sit on a toilet.