The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.

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.

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

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

I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.

Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.