Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let's roll.

There's this belief that some things can be taken seriously in an intellectual way, while some things are only entertainment or only a commodity. Or there's some kind of critical consensus that some things are "good," and some things are garbage, throwaway culture. And I think the difference between them, in a lot of ways, is actually much less than people think. Especially when you get down to how they affect the audience.

It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

All my friends are rock critics, so we talk about rock criticism a lot. Because of that, in order to be part of the conversation, you have to have an awareness of what the discussion is.

I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me.

I really hate being sick. It seems inevitable that at one point, one of these predicted epidemics is going to be real. So often they come up, and there's people like me that are freaked out, and the majority of people are just like, "You're being idiots, this happens every other year."