Collections are certainly abundant online. It's complicated, because it's not like these people didn't want computers, although there was some nonchalance about it. I would sometimes ask the people I interviewed if they wished they had a computer, and in a lot of cases, it was like they couldn't process the question. You don't know what you don't have, I guess.

I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.

I am very sincere. Some people are always kidding, so when you're not, it's going to seem annoying to them.

When I was fifteen, a dark shape came into my room at night. It was dark, but it glowed, which is the first of many facts you will have to tackle with your imagination. It wasn't in the shape of a person, but right away I knew it was like a person in every way except for how it looked. As it turns out, our looks are not the main thing that makes us human.

That's the artist's job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things.

We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which meant that we were not alone in this world.

I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.