Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass." Like somehow we're running out of time.

With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.

The bad news is we don't have any control. The good news is we can't make any mistakes.

This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you.

With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.

It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one.

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated.