It's a very teenage idea - this idea that thought is ruined when we give over to television shows and glossy magazines and what they are telling us to do. The alternative, I believe, in is pitiless censorship. Because we owe each other the best effort we can to see one another without that mediation.

I would never want to kill a human being.

It's a very teenage idea - this idea that thought is ruined when we give over to television shows and glossy magazines and what they are telling us to do. The alternative, I believe, in is pitiless censorship. Because we owe each other the best effort we can to see one another without that mediation.

Working in film, I'm sure you have insight into this, there's something great that only comes by way of interactions with others that a monastic life does not afford.

There's love and there's romantic love. The Greeks had different words for different kinds of love. And we just got "love." I don't know what you would call the other kinds - maybe brotherly love, Christian love, the love of Saint Francis, love of everyone and everything. Then there's romantic love, which, by and large, is a pain in the ass, a kind of trauma.

Anytime you can muster the fury to actually write in the face of the impossibility of writing, that's an achievement.

In terms of love and romance, it just seems less and less like that's ever going to happen again, or be a possibility for me. I feel like I've irrevocably lost so much. You want the surprise, but it gets harder and harder to find, whether we're talking about romance, or somebody else's song, or your own song.