I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.