For me, moving is always a big opportunity. Its just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it's no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can't miss shopping like you'd miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.

My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph.

I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling.