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 career as a magazine writer was largely prefaced on the idea of curiosity, to go on adventures and weasel my way into the lives of people that I admire.

I am not an Internet superstar.

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.

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.

Reality, while generally probable, is not always interesting.

It was inevitable that in the proliferation of media and media channels and the natural debasing of authority that comes when you make an expert of someone who knows a few things and can be on television and you put the word "expert" underneath them, that is to say me, then eventually the very concept of expertise itself would become meaningless.