As a reader I gravitate toward work that rests in the gray area, that doesn't come with easy answers.

As I get older, I'm finding that I recognize certain celebrities only because they frequently grace the pages of US Weekly, but beyond that, I have no idea what they do.

Usually at the core of fiction that has some element of the absurd there tends to be an examination of some societal ills that we should talk about more than we do. And it's funny, of course, so we have that release valve with absurdism. It offers us a safe way to explore difficult subject matter.

I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.

I've realized that with each novel I seem to set out a kind of puzzle for myself. And I am never sure in the process of writing a first draft how it's all going to turn out.

When a certain show or film or celebrity captures the imagination of the masses that has a good deal to say about us, I think, and what is happening in our collective psyche.

I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.