You see that in the news constantly; done both the right way and the wrong way. The most recent example I can think of, obviously, is Lance Armstrong, who got it all wrong. Who wanted to apologize strategically, instead of abjectly. What got me interested was the repetitive nature of it. There's something so ritualized about it. Then the ritual needs to be reenacted very carefully and pretty frequently - Tiger Woods, and now Manti Te'o and Lance Armstrong, and a little earlier Anthony Weiner or Eliot Spitzer.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

In high school, I had a teacher there who was really great to me and with whom I finally dared to admit I wanted to be a writer myself, and we did a project where I wrote terrible, 17-year-old fiction. But I remember a couple of the stories. I'd love it if I could read with pride something that I wrote that long ago, but it hasn't happened yet.

I hesitate to say yes - I had writer's block, because I know there are people who've had really serious cases of it, and I've never been paralyzed like that, but I definitely get blocked sometimes. More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.