For every hour a mother gets to herself, a father will demand five times that amount for drinking with friends and acting like an immature dipshit.

I was strangely looking forward to writing about my DUI arrest, only because I've known for four years that I was gonna write about it somehow. I dunno that it was "fun" to write, just something I'd been aching to purge from my system.

I'm always amazed by people like David Simon or the people at The Simpsons or J.K. Rowling who can create dozens and dozens of memorable characters. It seems so effortless, and even people who have just three lines in the shows or in the book have a very distinct personality, and you can feel the richness of their personal history.

I occasionally get glimpses, but I have to reprioritize, because that's how it naturally progresses - things like family, responsibilities, and your job all take precedent.

When a teacher is paying extra attention to your child, you believe that it's because you raised such an exceptional kid, one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest of her booger-eating friends.

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 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.