Stranger Than Fiction

All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they're always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what's about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there's those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos — this century's equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive.

The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it.

What’s funny is, you’d be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world.

It’s hard to call any of my novels “fiction.”

If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.

In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.

Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.