Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.

I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.

But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.

A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.