I'm an older, wall-eyed, overweight, tweedy writer who has been lucky enough to be asked to play various iterations of himself in a certain realm of popular cultutre. That gives me great joy and excitement, but I don't go to the media saying, "And I'm also the world's greatest actor."

Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.

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.

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.

There is no metaphor for death. All comparisons are odious, but I'll do one anyway. We all have these moments of harsh clarity where we realize that something is gone, whether that is youth, whether that is someone we care about, whether that is where we literally lose someone we care about to death. Or we end a relationship that we thought would last forever, or have one ended for us. We all have these moments in life where it seems impossible to fill up the time that we have left for us, and yet we have to do it somehow.

When you think about it, the end of the world is a little bit like death: We all know it's going to come eventually, and as we get older, we feel we see the signs more and more distinctly.

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.