I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.

What happens, I think, is especially for comic effect you find something about yourself that you don't like. You exaggerate it, and it's funny.

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.