No one is drawn to writing about being happy or feelings of joy.

I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.

I think the '80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don't necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me - or I let happen to me - were about that decade.

Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

What keeps me interested--and it always does--is how can she be a bad actress on film but a good one in reality?

When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.

I tried to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body