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.

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.

I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday and you're 17 years old.

If you're standing in the middle of a ring and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.