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 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.

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.

I'm against eating a human being alive - I don't do it. Somebody might make cannibalism jokes and laugh it off like it's nothing. I don't agree with that. I want to proclaim a rejection of cannibalism.

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.

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.

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