I'm an equal opportunity reader - although I don't much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.