Your new book, ‘‘Theft by Finding,’’ is a compendium of your diary entries from 1977 to 2002. I take the title to mean that you ‘‘find’’ things of value that other people have discarded: their observations about themselves, their thoughts, their dialogue? The other night, somebody told me a story — oh, it was this woman who was driving me. She was talking about her mother, who lives in eastern North Carolina, and she had to get up really early, and her mother said, ‘‘I hain’t even rolled over good.’’ I just thought: I’ll take that! It was so beautiful and so unexpected, and of course, I put it in my diary. I’m not going to pretend I invented it, but I am definitely not forgetting that.

You’ve also made a mini-career out of picking up trash in your neighborhood. Where do you find more interesting stuff: your diaries or trash? I think my diary, but then, like the trash, my diary is a lot of the same stuff over and over. Writing that I went somewhere and every single person in the room was on their cellphone — that’s the equivalent of a Red Bull can, an empty potato-chip bag. It’s like: ‘‘I’ve seen this before. How many times have I seen this?’’ But still, I write it in my diary. That wouldn’t mean I’d put it in a book over and over again.

How did you figure out what would be interesting, then? There were a lot of things that I put in the diary that my editor kindly informed me weren’t as interesting as I thought they were, which is great, because that’s what she’s there for. To me, every turd that’s not in a toilet is interesting. Every single one of them. It’s interesting if it’s in the dressing room of Banana Republic. It’s interesting if it’s on the ground outside of a Starbucks. But somebody else might think, Oh, my God, that’s disgusting, we don’t want to hear about that.