I write all day every day, so when I feel unproductive, it magnifies everything else.

I always want to sleep on the third date.

I'm really close to my mom, but things with my dad have been different. He has dementia and watching him change, I've actually started to think that it's a purer state for people. Because he operates as if he's a child and everything is new, which seems more honest.

I think language is a system that we have devised to negotiate a series of more amorphous entities. It's a layer you can use to see where those things exist, but if you don't have anyone speaking anymore, those things are still there. The things that language stands for do not require humans, and in fact are often trampled down by humans.

I like smartasses, because I can be smartass back and rashy.

When I was a kid my primary goal in life was to find a book that was alive. Not alive in the human sense, but like a thing that would send me to a place not otherwise accessible on Earth. This book should have hidden words encrypted beneath the printed ones, so that if I worked hard enough and discovered the code I would somehow end up inside the book, or the book would take on a body and consume me, revealing a secret set of rooms behind the wall in my bedroom, for instance, inside which anything could be.

I'm not an escapist, but the value of language is that it can create places that did not exist before. And so language for me doesn't reflect the world, it extends the world, so that it becomes larger and more fantastic and less mired in this school shooting bullshit. It actually builds a future - that's how evolution occurs.