Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook.

When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.

I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.