I am the neurological opposite of a psychopath, in that I feel anxious almost all the time. It must be great to not constantly feel like you’ve got someone living inside your face, shooting you with a mini Taser.

I have thought sometimes that the sanest people, the people who are just very balanced, very happy, are probably lower achieving than other people. My kind of irrationality happens to be fear or anxiety.

We're living in post-nuance online times.

I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds.

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

No, people back home don't realize why there is this kind of need for heroes in America at the moment. People in Britain don't really understand what's going on here. They don't understand why Camp X-ray exists.