I think, as we all learn as a child, you have to learn to tolerate ambiguity better and I'm still terrible at it and I hate it; even the word ambiguity makes me sick to me stomach.

Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.

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.

I think for the foreseeable future, the truth is going to be awful and funny all at the same time.

By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.

The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.

By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me.