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.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.