In all the music I've done, what I'm really interested in above all else, and I'm not sure it's what one should be interested in, is the kind of - you know, people talk about work progressions, which doesn't really make sense with pop music because there is no progression, because there is no tonic, because there is no more tonality.

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.

Various people have put forth that love is the scene of two, that it's not about unity, it's about two absolutely disjunct positions encountering each other. So here, even with something like sex-- what [that song's] about-- you could never become one.

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.

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.

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

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.