This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.

Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.

Any time you try to create an Internet meme, automatic fail. That's like the worst thing you can do.

All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.

You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".

Just a small-scale cult of personality, maybe raise a geodetic dome out in western Massachusetts and make people wear jumpsuits and give all their possessions to me.