The few people who ask to have their photographs with me, I almost always say yes, except for a few circumstances, like when my family is around.

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.

By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.

Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.

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.

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

As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.