There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.

You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.

I crave music that'll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

Take dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority.

I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.