Don't be a fish; be a frog. Swim in the water and jump when you hit ground.

We use the coastline as much as the sea otters. And we take fish from the water, we swim in the water, surf in the water. And what's happening to the sea otter could very well be happening to a much larger picture than just the animals themselves.

We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall.

There's Frog Jump on my GPS, so it's there. It's a real place.

I like to take certain aspects of genre fiction and modify them in my own way. 'Your Republic Is Calling You' follows the form of a spy novel, but it leads readers into a world of Kafkaesque irrationality.

When I wrote 'Your Republic Is Calling You,' it was Franz Kafka's writing that I had most in mind, and James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' Entirely out of the blue, Kafka's characters receive an order to go somewhere, and when they try to comply, they never quite manage it. Ki-yong in 'Your Republic Is Calling You' is precisely that sort of character.