I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.

I tend to think of myself as a highly emotional writer. It's all coming out of the deepest feelings, out of dreams, out of the unconscious.

As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.

It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity... it's a safe enclosure.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.