I had just turned 28 and sold my first book, a travel guide for vegetarians, but I'd tell people about the day job that I didn't care about instead - I placed banner advertisements on the web for a search engine company.

I'm at my best when I'm being genuine and sincere, and reading my material straight up to an audience that wants to listen.

I love Dave Eggers. I hate Dave Eggers. If I could become any other living writer, I would answer faster than anyone else in the room, 'Dave Eggers.'

I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program.

I'm sort of one of those weird actors who whenever I do a play, I think, 'Oh, we should film this,' as opposed to have to belt it out of ourselves in a theater auditorium.

If you don't have a sense of adventure in this job, then you're not going to do very well. You have to be prepared for the unexpected, and that's one of the reasons why you really, really, really have to trust the people you're going to work with because you don't know what's on the other end.

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

I'm creative. I can't relax unless I've got some project on the go. I'm somebody from art school, and art school during the punk era, when you just had a go at whatever came along.