If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

The Bush administration is a paragon of wisdom.

For me, the fiction writer's job is to take the small, stupid process of learning to use an iPhone - and suddenly you're the guy who's asking your daughter, "When I go on Facebook, can it see me?"

The story sometimes writes you into a corner.

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.