I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

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

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

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.

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.