'Will Grayson, Will Grayson' is about two guys named Will Grayson who live in different Chicago suburbs who eventually meet each other.
I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.
I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.
I enjoy writing about people falling in love, probably because I think the first time you fall in love is the first time that you have to figure out how you're going to orient your life. What are you going to value? What's going to be most important to you? And I think that's really interesting to write about.
I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.
Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.
It's hard to get movie studios to pay a lot of money for movies that don't have robots or explosions.
One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer.
I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.
My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.
We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'