I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

My British publisher has this independent press. It's pretty small; they actually won last year. And she's got this great energy, and she's fiercely independent, and you know this book was a hard sell. No one wanted to buy this book. But she did, and so it's paid off for her, I hope.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have to fold that into what you're working on.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to that person who's on the outside.

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."