My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.