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

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

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.

The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.