It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.

I was going to die and it was taking forever.

The whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it's just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss. Like, I'm supposed to be writing this book, but - heh heh heh - I'm writing a movie, secretly. I'm procrastinating, and in my off-hours I'm working on this movie that I'm not allowed to do, because I'm supposed to be writing a book!

I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one's ever done that before. As if I'm literally the first person to ever write a book.

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

My ideal life is just lounging around the house and every once in a while I'll kind of write something, and then I'll leave and eat something and masturbate or whatever - just this very fluid life of comforting myself.

I'm interested in what the virtues of all those things are, especially for the kind of person who's made their own world that revolves around them, like writers do. It seems especially precious.