Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.

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.

She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

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

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.