Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

I just started going to shows. I don't know how submerged I am: I feel guilty that I don't get out more, but I really like being inside the house.

I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.