We Were Fractious And Overpaid.

I Believe People Think As A Group More Often Than We Might Realize Or Care To Admit. We Like To Believe That We Act As Individuals And Nothing More, But Time And Again - In Corporations And Business, In Politics And Religion, In Fashion And Culture, And In Friendships And Social Circles - We Think And Do As One.

We Suffered Failures Of Imagination Just Like Everyone Else, Our Daring Was Wanting, And Our Daily Contentment Too Nearly Adequate For Us To Give It Up.

There Were Times Where I Felt I Was Pressing A Little Bit Too Hard With The Humor, And I Had To Pull Back, Because The Overriding Concern Of The Book Was To Create This Disease That Had No Cure And Make You Pay Attention To Every Emotional Stage Of What Happens.

I Think A Fairly Common Behavior Among Fiction Writers Is That They Want To Help. They're Generally Charitable People. They're Interested In The World. They're Curious, They're Empathetic. They Understand Suffering. They Don't Turn Away From That. But What They Do Is Essentially Useless. Except For The Sake Of The Thing Itself.

The Whole Time I Was Writing, I Had To Fight My Normal Inclination To Be Funny, To Sort Of Patch Humor In, In Order To Convey All Of The Disruptions Of The Disease To The Family Dynamic, The Loss Of Individuality, The Impact On Professional Life, And The Sanity Of The Main Character. Of Course, That's Not To Say It Never Sneaks In; There's Some Black Comedy In There, Like When He Shows Up To Court Wearing A Bicycle Helmet And Won't Take It Off.