A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

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.

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.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

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.

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.