Who gives a better interview, Stanley Bing or Gil Schwartz?
Bing, definitely. Schwartz has no comment on anything. And when talking about my books, it's important that people don't go to the bookstore and forget my name. There are so many books in the bookstore. To go to the bookstore as an author who's alive and not F. Scott Fitzgerald is a daunting, scary thing. So it's important we leave Gil at the door.

Which is easier, writing or managing people?
Managing people is a part of my daily life that comes up sort of without warning and without any particular invitation. So I don't have to say, "All right, I'm going to sit down and start managing people now." The hard part about writing isn't so much the writing as the sitting down. For me, once I'm actually sitting there and writing, I'm generally having a good time. I amuse myself tremendously. But the actual experience of sitting down and having to write, well, I'd rather have a needle poked into my palm. And what I do is, well, I've mastered the many subtle arts of procrastination over a lifetime of putting things off until tomorrow. And I'm really good at them. In fact, I once wrote a column on the art of procrastination, which I divided into precrastination, procrastination, and postcrastination.

Most writers talk about that in terms of being rituals.
For me, that's been difficult, because my day job has so few rituals, other than just being there. The one ritual I have established when I'm writing a book or if I have a column due that morning is that I take the train. I commute rather than drive. That gives me 45 minutes of sitting in a quiet environment where all you hear is the sneezing and coughing of other people. But unlike other writers, I don't get up at 6 and have coffee. Stephen King, I've read, gets up very early, works for five hours, and turns out 100 pages a day. I'm basically worried about a million different things a day having to do with my job, and the way I generally do it is when I'm supposed to be writing, I worry about my job, and when I worry about my job, I write.