Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.

My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.

What I like is horror movies, including '80s slasher movies that politically I have all kinds of problems with. Which is an interesting balance, because I have this leftist puritan strain that, well, if you like something that goes against your politics, maybe you should train yourself not to like it. But I know that I like horror movies and that's what I watch when I get a moment.

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.