A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.

The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.

In Lullabies, I wanted to capture what I remembered of the drunken babbling of unfortunate twelve-year-olds: their illusions, their ludicrously bad choices, their lack of morality and utter disbelief in cause and effect