When a good friend gives you his or her book, you don't want to read it, because you're afraid that it's not going be what you hope it can be.

My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.

I know electric knives are excellent for carving turkeys that have had their bones removed and been forced into a mold to shape them. Please note that those turkeys are called hams.

What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.

There is no metaphor for death. All comparisons are odious, but I'll do one anyway. We all have these moments of harsh clarity where we realize that something is gone, whether that is youth, whether that is someone we care about, whether that is where we literally lose someone we care about to death. Or we end a relationship that we thought would last forever, or have one ended for us. We all have these moments in life where it seems impossible to fill up the time that we have left for us, and yet we have to do it somehow.

Even the worst job has its benefits and so does being a professional literary agent, and - I know I said this at the time but I still believe it - the worst job is the one that you know is wrong for you, but you still do it. You're afraid to quit.

So I am a product of the Internet, and to some degree a product of this sensibility of constant cultural reference.