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

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.

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.

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.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.