It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.

The only time I've ever been mistaken for someone else is - and this arguable still - when a person came up to me on the boardwalk of Ocean City, New Jersey and said, "You look a lot like that guy from computer ads" and I said, "There is a reason because I am that guy," and the guy looked at me for a minute, laughed and said, "That's a funny joke, but you really do look like him." He thought I was not 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.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.

Elwyn Brooks White was a very Maine personality which is, "I hate everyone and everyone stay away from me."

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.