I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.

I got a woman I'm loyal to above all things, above my career. She's profound to me. I'm quiet. I live in Kansas City. I work.

Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.

I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.

I want to have enough data, so I won't write myself into thin air, so that I can extrapolate and give you this secret human infrastructure. The only way I sate my own curiosity is to create this from scratch. There must be commanding love stories. There must be great moral cost.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.