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

You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.

The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.

My whole creative career is a product of the Internet. ...I'll take that back. To some degree. My fascination with cultural esoterica and trivia and so on was well-formed long before I got my first AOL account.

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.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

What I've discovered more recently is copies of books that I didn't represent, but that my boss represented when I assisted her on the dollar pile. I won't mention any names, but it is this profoundly bittersweet time of realizing, "Oh, I had a wonderful time working on this book and now it is a dollar relic on the side of the road."