You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one.

I hadn't played any music since freshman year of college, more than thirty years ago, so I had to relearn everything. I started writing songs. Some were dance and trance songs (I listen to them a lot while I'm writing), and some were love songs, because that after all is what music is about - dancing and trancing and love and love's setbacks.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.