When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

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

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.

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.