Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

There have been hermaphrodites around forever, Cal. Forever. Plato said that the original human being was a hermaphrodite. Did you know that? The original person was two halves, one male, one female. Then these got separated. That's why everybody's always searching for their other half. Except for us. We've got both halves already.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.

To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.

That was the deal basically: catatonia without; frenzy within

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.