It's so important what you're doing in your life. It's tremendously important to the work, and no aesthetic theories take that into account.

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

It seems to me that the best work I've done - and maybe this is something other people can identify with - was because it was an end in itself. It was something other than making ends meet, it was an escape from all that.

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 have no idea what the hell is going on in the world, in my life, in what anything means, or what I'm supposed to do.

There's really not much in life that's as violent or traumatic as an encounter with somebody who really surprises you and opens up that strange dynamic that's involved in romantic love.

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.