One thing that I discovered about myself is I really don't like traveling. I feel like it's a terrible personal failing, but I was so satisfied to arrive at the conclusion.

We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.

Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It's more difficult to be a friend - even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it's more of a challenge for them. It's just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.

Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.