I think when you get to export your creative impulse into something, it kind of lessens that busy energy that can be so confrontational and pissy.

If I find myself being too earnest and sentimental and hyperbolic and simplistic, which is definitely a tendency I have, then I bring in this perverse henchman.

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?"

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

When somebody you've known for 20 years, and with whom you have a full context, winks at you or whatever, it can be huge. I think in a sense what you're trying to re-create in fiction is that.

Even the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.

[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.