My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.

You can tell he never even considered the possibility of something like this happening to him. He's as out of his element hiring an investigator to snoop on his wife as he would be auditioning for a Russian ballet.

When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that's what I studied, I mean, scholarly.

I'm a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.

Fear is one of the elements of nonlethal weaponry. You're going to get hurt, and you don't want to get hurt. Pepper spray hurts. You don't want to be sprayed. That's why it's a useful deterrent as a nonlethal weapon - I'm not advocating spraying people randomly.

There was a time in my career when my hackles would really get raised if someone came in and said, 'We need you to do this or that.' But the fact of the matter is, you're working in a shared universe, and all elements of the universe are, ideally, going to mesh and work together. That's my goal. I want to be on the team.