I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

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

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

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart...

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.