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.

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.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

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

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.