The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.

Sometimes I pretend not to look at my own characters, because that's like different people getting off with your girlfriend or something.

We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens.

And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. "Just fo feel. Just to feel something.

Then I reminded myself that all intelligent children suffer bad dreams.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that schools are just factories for turning out robots, that's all. They get you when your small and vulnerable and they take all the human parts away, bit by bit, until you're just a wind-up toy. Turn the key and set it running. And the toy goes to university, gets a job, settles down with someone nice.

I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience.