I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

I think I'm a shy, self-conscious person who thinks he's being looked at and tries to look okay. Not in a hottie, narcissistic way necessarily.

In me, speaking psychologically, there is always an ongoing struggle between my enormously self-regarding, almost delusionally aspirational, Napoleonic personality and a marginalized one.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.

One of the things that struck me as unique about Hollywood is that I never had bad meetings. There were all enthusiastic, but meaninglessly enthusiastic.

I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.