As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity... it's a safe enclosure.

I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

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

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.