I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

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.

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

Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

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.

Life is fundamentally up for grabs