I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

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

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

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.