I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they are from - where they sit in relation to time. Age has become much more divisive than place. With the Internet and globalization, a twenty-year-old in New York has far more cultural references in common with a twenty-year-old in Nebraska than they do with a thirty-year-old who lives next door. National identity is what they trick you with when they want your feet in their army boots or your taxes in their bailouts.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.