We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

I hate that word dysfunction.

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.