I would be at home reading, because I felt so disconnected from humanity.

You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them.

I want to be heavily tied to a city that I write for every week, that knows my stuff and I can interact with.

What I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in.

You can get away with stuff in a one-page story that you can't get away with in a book.

Being in New York and having worked at Time Out New York and then being at Time, living in New York for a long time has helped because I know everybody. And they're the people who call me and give me jobs. So that kind of real networking, which is just living in a place and having jobs where people around you are extremely successful, has helped me tremendously.

When Time got rid of my column, I thought it was all over. It was really sad. And then, I just started pushing it to lots of places. And I thought someone would run my column, I thought it was popular, and no one wanted it.