Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.

I don't think secrets are a bad thing. I think there's this idea that everything needs to be transparent in order for it to be free.

It's really hard to write about art in general. But it's exceptionally hard to fictionalize art and make work that isn't a parody, or is something that could withstand critique and exist in the art world as a valuable object, or a true piece.

You find when you're writing a detective story that you're actually not trying to solve anything. You're trying to stop the reader from solving the puzzle.

I also remember when I watched Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer [1990] at, like, age 15. That scared the crap out of me. Because it didn't operate inside the usual conventions of the horror genre in the way that I could accept. I can accept horny teenager counselors being murdered at camp. But I couldn't accept the derangement of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was that anyone could be murdered at any moment - whole families, with no build-up music and no meaning. It terrified me.

I feel that I'm solid at description.

There seem to be two ways of generating interest from the reader: withholding information or by telling the reader on the first page exactly what's going to happen.