If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel, world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.