Everybody uses pop culture as a shorthand. You might make an obscure reference to Monty Python or Iron Eagle that only some people will get, but if they do it conveys a world of meaning.

I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills. Online, I didn't have a problem talking to people or making friends. But in the real world. interacting with other people - especially kids my own age - made me a nervous wreck. I never knew how to act or what to say, and when I did work up the courage to speak, I always seemed to say the wrong thing.

My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.

I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn't know how to connect with the people there.

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

I felt like a kid standing in the world's greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

I noticed in the late 1990s that my friends and I were already nostalgic for the 1980s, and by the turn of the century, VH1's 'I Love the '80s' gave all of us an accelerated nostalgia for our generation.