Music is dangerous in so many ways. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.

We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.