Being Serious Is Serious Business In Fiction.

The Office Is A Romantic Enabler Because You're Always Around The Person You Have A Crush On. There's No Escape From, And Maybe No Desire To Escape From, Those Pressure-cooker Conditions. And There's An Automatic Series Of Things You Have To Talk About All The Time.

I Don't Write Directly On To The Computer Because I Don't Think Well Facing Forward With Fingers On A Keyboard. I Think Better Looking Down Holding A Pen. And The Concentration Quotient Of Pen And Paper Is Higher Than When I'm Moving Words Around On Screen.

I Think If There Hadn't Been The One Passage Of The Book That Mostly Abandons The Humor, And Focuses Very Intently On One Person's Struggle With Cancer, It Wouldn't Have Been A Critical Success. So That Was A Very Deliberate Decision, To Say "well, If You Think It's All Fun And Games, It's Not." So That Was My Approach: We're Going To Have As Much Fun As I Can Possibly Provide, But The Serious Things That Might Normally Pass By You Are Not Going To Be Lost.

Humor Is A Very Big Part Of Life, And If You Exclude Humor From Your Book, You're Not Capturing A Very Important Part Of Human Experience.

If Someone Were Plucked From The Group And Given Those Responsibilities, They Might Find Themselves Growing More Aloof, Just By Virtue Of That Promotion. Suddenly The Group Culture Excludes You. I Saw This In My Own Working Life, And I Don't Think It's A Coincidence - I Sensed A Kind Of Loneliness In Middle Managers Especially.