[on who are his favorite playwrights] An impossible question. But, since the greatest show on earth is the show of human emotion, for complexity of character, psychological nuance and downright dramatic behaviour, it's only three: Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson.

I'm not a fan of science fiction - life on earth is mysterious and terrifying enough. I'm often drawn by tone and by the slant of the language. The way the sentences pop. A few well-angled sentences announce to me if this is a voice whose command I can trust or whose quirkiness intrigues. Style, after all, is metabolism. Even if it's non-fiction, the writing has to have a pulse, something I can feel beneath the facts.

[on the favorite of his own published works] Each book inevitably engineers some emotional transition in a writer's life, but given one I'd say my first book, 'Notes on a Cowardly Lion', which I finished the week my father died when I was twenty-six. In it, I mourned him and preserved him.