No, there are no straight lines.

So for me, there was not a huge amount of like long-term planning.

At a certain point, I felt like I needed a long-term plan, but then what I also found

is that any long-term plan immediately hits the ugly truth of reality and then becomes

a joke.

And so for me, I think very carefully about what's next.

What's next?

A little doctoro, the great novelist, had this lovely metaphor for writing.

I think it's true in some levels for careers and for life, which is that you're driving

on a dark night and you have your headlights on and you can only see, you know, a few meters

ahead of you.

And that's sometimes aggravating.

But the thing is, you can make the whole journey that way.

And that's sort of how I feel about it.

So what I do, when you ask about books, it's like, I don't have any long-term strategy

for the books.

I find something that I find an idea, a set of stories, a concept that I find so irresistible

that I'm willing to endure the torture of writing it and to get the pleasure of being

able to talk about it for the rest of my life.

When we experience regret, it's somehow an aberration.

When in fact, everybody experiences regret.

Regret makes us human.

...