Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.