I've never really liked L.A., because of its sprawl.

The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.

I don't like my books being defined by their "about"-ness. So now the subtitle has just become a kind of strap-line on the cover.

I'd have no rituals, but I'm a person of compulsive habit. That's just some awful residue of a ritual. And one of the reasons for that is my living this life, which is otherwise so free of obligations. It's not at all unusual for anybody who's independently employed to crave a way of living whereby they create the structures without which their lives would otherwise start slopping around all over the place.

One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they've done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals. They've written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal!

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

I've never been much drawn towards satire of any kind. I don't like that style whereby you kind of stitch people up. But the deeper thing is that I just find these people so impressive and admirable.