Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.

I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.

Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.

I was always fascinated with the way that things pop on the Internet - the ways you build communities and create little stories and ideas that people play around with and send back to you.

Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years.

I would say 70 percent of people who are in therapy are in therapy not because of their upbringing, not because of their mean sister or obsessions, but because of anxiety brought about by lack of financial security.