I don't mean to romanticise the struggle, that leads to all kinds of terrible violence and absurdities that are even worse than the perverse immediate gratification.

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

The categories of woman and man are too rigid. They're going to give way to new forces. They already have, to a degree, but for most of us, this drama held sway, and we assumed our positions.

I'm steeped in aesthetic theory, so I tend to bring in my own amateurish way of baring a little bit - when, in practice, I'm not thinking about that when I'm working over the keyboard, or musing over musical ideas in my head. But when discussing it, we want to have some new thought about this new music.

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.

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.

I don't really know what playing is. There's a way to do it correctly, but it eludes me. I think getting in front of an audience is definitely a good way to focus in on the real dimension of the activity, the most important dimension.