It’s a long journey, you know. I really believe in the work of the unconscious. You have an idea, you think about it. You dream about it. But, for me, it’s my way of working, it depends on writing of course. I don’t need to go every day in front of my computer and write something. It’s always a surprise. In the moment, it’s a necessity. You need to write, so you write a thing.

So I got this new attitude.  Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

We didn’t research the product. We didn’t launch a focus group or field a study. We had an idea, and we acted. The results informed our thinking.

Right. It saves you from giving up. This present novel that will be out — Villages — I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it. So, it was really the habit — the habit of writing that kept me at it in the end. It was like a bad marriage. I mean, whatever. This is the wife I’m married to here, and I’m going to finish this book. Finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it. So yes, it’s good to have a certain doggedness to your technique.

My oldest friend, in three words, would say "My friend Derek." How's that for a cop-out answer?

I do not want to be an expert in anything.

I literally just call my five or ten best friends around the world. Sometimes I just go through the list. I call Aly. Ah, no answer. Okay, let me try Mitra. Ah, no answer. Okay, let me try Zita. "Hey, I got an idea. Let me run it by you? Okay? You got a minute?"

Sometimes you don't even need your friend to say yay or nay, you just have to hear yourself expressing it out loud to another person that's never heard it before. And I particularly like doing the out loud bit. I like my sentences to sound good.

The first version of my How to Live book was 1300 pages. It took a couple of years to write and it was 1300 pages, and then it took a couple of years to edit it down to 115 pages. Most of my writing process is editing.

there is a flight leaving in 20 minutes, but there's only two first class seats left and it's going to be like $7,000." And I went, "All right, let's do it. Put us on that flight."