When I read Spencer Madsen’s poetry, I not only feel awe because he’s so good, one of the best, but I also think about how everything in the world is happening at the same time, and how the world we get to know is so heavily edited down. It’s the hugest, weirdest feeling. I wish Spencer Madsen could be everywhere at once. I really love You Can Make Anything Sad.

Why is it I feel a new nostalgia for the era of the guillotine?

A lot of writers do think of their characters as living beings. I know that's the way people think. That's why I try to make them real in a certain way, because otherwise people won't read them. It's fine if some readers think of them as real. It's just not the way that I think of them.

I want to love someone so selflessly that he would never even think about going away. I suppose that's what most people want. In fact, that's probably why we don't kill one another all the time. Everyone's just a little too lonely to risk it.

I was thinking a lot about music, about how music is mixed and how everything is happening at the same time; it just amounts to how the sound is lowered or raised. I was trying to get that with writing.

I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I've studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it.

My novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions.