I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.

I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.

I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.

If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It's not an intellectual process.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.