As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the 60s and 70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can't underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged!

By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.

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.

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.