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.

I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.

Tonally, there was no discussion; I just don’t know any other way to do it. I don’t want to make people feel bad, and I don’t want to make their problems into a joke. I do love telling people when they’re right and wrong, but for the most part, it was always going to be about real fights where people have a real difference of opinion and a real dispute. I want to make jokes, but I also want to make a decision that is fair.

Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting.

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.

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

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