Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

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.

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.

Why shouldn't it be that way for the rest of us? Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn't know it could be that easy. I didn't know that until just now. That sounds good to me.

I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They're generally charitable people. They're interested in the world. They're curious, they're empathetic. They understand suffering. They don't turn away from that. But what they do is essentially useless. Except for the sake of the thing itself.

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer.

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.