As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.

I dont really have an office or anything, and I like to have to move location every two hours. So I just kind of write in a park, on a bench, in the library, in a cafe, back to the library, that kind of thing.

I've never had a mentor personally of any kind. It feels like, generally, in the writing world or the art world, it's more of a thing in America, because you have writing programs, which we don't have. You have these amazing writers who are teachers. I never did a writing program so I never met a writer until I was published. I guess I can't really explain my compulsion for writing these kind of mentor characters.

I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he's so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.

I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.

I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.

On the one hand I'm writing about somebody about whom I say in the book, "The only thing worse than being a statistic is being a statistical anomaly." So I'm writing about a particularly unlucky person. So that's a special type of hell, to be particularly unlucky.