I used to joke about this but I've recently realized that I really believe it: I spent many years training myself to write very slowly for pretty good money. So the idea of writing really quickly for free offends me.

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can't tell you how many times a conversation went like this: "We've got to stop these immigrants, because it's terrible." I'd say, "Okay, what personally have you observed about this?" And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I'd say, "Where'd you get your information?" thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, "Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources." Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.

As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.