On the internet:

“If you talk long enough you’re going to say something stupid”

On Secondhand Souls:

“Books are like children. You have your oldest one, your youngest one, and the one that you lock in the attic. If you produce enough of them one is just going to be goofy. Secondhand Souls is my goofy child.”

“A lot of this book is ‘get off my lawn’ humor.”

On aging:

“I got a Fitbit. I lost 30 pounds. Every run I take it asks, ‘what’s your goal?’ Um, I would like to outrun death.”

“I thought I knew something about death. Basically I’m on death’s doorstep now. When I say I’m on death’s doorstep, so are you. That’s the thing we have in common. Death runs in my family.”

“The hipsters with their tiny clothes. There’s a certain neighborhood in San Francisco that’s just infested with tiny cardigans. I’m like, ‘One day you’re going to look back at this and wish you’d worn a sweater that fit you.’”

“There’s no point in my life when I don’t look at the decade before and go: What an asshole that guy was. At a point it’s like, which of these people is your soul. Which one of those douchebags that I was is my immortal soul?”

On immigration:

“A wall, really? That worked great for the Chinese in 800 B.C. but then some bastard invented the ladder.”

On writing:

“I’m working on a noir set in San Francisco in 1947. And now you know as much about it as I do. She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes. I just want it to be silly bad metaphors.”

“I like to write stories that leave the arc of the world going on. I can’t do it all for you. My job is just to spur your imagination.”

“I want to write another Shakespeare adaptation. I love writing Pocket. it’s just all day thinking of clever obscenities, which is how I want to spend my retirement.”