It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.

I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.

I loved every minute of my childhood - sunbathing on the fire escape, digging for buried treasure in the back yard, pulling alewives out of the sand... Then it was all taken away from me. I came back every summer to visit my father until I was 18, but I was always the outsider.

That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.

I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realise, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.