Nick Earls

I think one of the things the writers' festival does that is very good is that it brings writers from around the world and around the country and locally and puts them all in the one spot together, and that's what a lot of the world's great writers' festivals do.

When I create a character, particularly my central character, I want someone who is interesting and feels real and who might have quite a few virtues but is unlikely to be perfect, who hasn't necessarily made all the right choices.

I started out in New York, and New York has a way of countering a Southern accent, naturally; when I moved to Los Angeles for a job, and I just stayed, the dialect out here doesn't really counter, and my Southern started coming back.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by 'survival of the fittest.'

Whenever you have dynamic interactions between 300 million people and the American economy acting in really complex ways, that introduces a degree of almost chaos theory to the system, in a literal sense.