I think fiction is very important because it gets us into the mind of a person. Hamlet is a tremendous piece of literature. You know Hamlet better than you know most real people. Do you know the reason? Because you know what he’s thinking. And this teaches you that every human has an integrity and an autonomy and a spirituality of his own, of her own, and great literature can teach you that.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. That book changed my life, blew my mind. If you’re going to read that book, take it slow in my opinion.

I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.

Well, many. I think Steinbeck, for example, was one of my favorites, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway. Quite a few.

My favorite writer is Alice Munro—all of her books. She’s a tremendous writer and has taught me so much about writing. She’s my favorite among many, many other books and writers I love.

I think it would be this thing that I learned when I was writing my first book. It would be surrender to your own mediocrity, which sounds kind of sad, right?

My mother would have been proud of my hike. I would love for my own children to have such adventures someday. I hope they do. I hope the word that comes to them when they see a photograph of me in twenty years is go.

I have two kids, so once we get them off to school, I tool around on email and Facebook longer than I should. Then I shut those things down and get to work.

Okay, let me tell you guys. I didn’t know this until last week. There’s a thing called a boot box for your long boots. You put your long boots in them instead of them draping all over the floor of your closet, and then you put a bump on the shelf.

The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing.