I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.

I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.