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

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

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.

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to.

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.