I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

I actually do believe in life after death.

Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.

As much as we - in a revisionist way - tell ourselves that we've always been a righteous country with a couple of swerves off the path, we need to look back and see that we've always also been a racist country and have had a tendency towards banal aggressiveness. The thing that's alarming is not so much that a few people in America at the top are initiating these crazy policies, but that the middle is willing to go there too. There's a strange movement of the middle to this position of banal aggressiveness.

It's one thing to be a perfectionist when you're alone, but when you're trying to make it work in an ensemble that's a whole different deal.

I've had that my whole career. People were always hedging around the question of: Why are you so dark? What happened to you?

You don't want to spend your life writing about stuff that doesn't matter. You want to try to pull out of the temporal mediocre and write in a way that is meaningful to everybody. This goes back to this idea of being intimate with your reader. Since we're all down here and we're all dying and aspiring and loving and feeling inadequate, all these things that we all are doing all the time, what a relief it is, when somebody looks at you and says, "Yeah, me too."