First of all, I wish I could grow a beard.

People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

I made an impulse buy of a house in Maine to make my wife happy and now have gone back into debt and it's all started over for me.

Generally speaking, I, like anyone else who does anything publicly, like it when people like what I do, and would like to hear as much.

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.

I think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I'll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.

I realized that we're now at a point of self-reference with the Internet culture that there's almost no there left, you know? It's important to make new things. It's important to make culture, rather than simply reference it. I love a good cultural reference, and it's one of the great joys in my life, but it has to all be in balance with the core job, which is to make something new. And that sort of brings me around to why I started talking about my fondness for marijuana.