Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life - inside your own life, it doesnt feel familiar any more.

I said I'd stop for a year, which was inconceivable to me and everyone around me. It seemed like so long. But then, after that year, I looked up and I still hadn't gotten my land legs back at all.

If you calculate every single thing you could possibly need in your life, you would need no more than 200 people to keep all that afloat: a doctor, food, wine, cheese-eating friends, the person who makes paper, the shoemaker.

I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.

I had a guitar leaning against the wall and I'd squint at it. It was almost like a dog that had been kicked - I didn't think I had anything to offer it.

I would try to pick the guitar up sometimes, like, "Hey, remember me?" It was like reintroducing yourself to someone who's got a grudge.

Instead of just looking back, whiplash-style, I can assume there's something else coming. Time just folds over itself, like origami.