It's always surprised me that mainstream America had the good taste to like R.E.M. It doesn't have the digestible quality the general public tends to look for in its favorite musicians.

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

We've come under the influence of television, where in all honesty we can follow a show that could just get cancelled midway through the season and the entire plotline never resolves itself.

It is a little out of touch to presume that someone wants to follow your every observation and insight over the course of hundreds of pages without any sort of payoff. That's why writing isn't a one-way street. You have to give something back: an interesting plot, a surprise, a laugh, a moment of tenderness, a mystery for the reader to piece together.

Every time I try to write on vacation, I fail miserably.

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.

I really believe there is something in the nature of a democracy that naturally leads people to distrust the government, to assume because a democracy is built by people just like themselves that there must be secret plots and cover-ups and wizards behind the scenes running the machine.