When you're a young person, you are biologically driven to believe you are immortal, and that's why you engage in all kinds of risky behavior you stop once you feel death's cruel breath on your neck. I think that as a straight white man in particular, I was tempted to believe that I was immortal and eternal because, after all, in this culture, straight white dudes are the heroes of every story that you see or read about with very rare exception. So how could the story go on without the hero, you know?

Most people presume my mustache is not real because it's much darker than my regular hair.

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.

John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald meet in hell and team up to assassinate Satan.

The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.

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

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.