If I'm in LA, I'm close to home, and that just brings up all these other things, good and bad. There is a reason why I am not there .

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

I'm very fortunate. I'm not much of a self-promoter or anything.

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.

If all the students who slept through lectures were laid end to end, they'd all be a lot more comfortable. If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.

My British publisher has this independent press. It's pretty small; they actually won last year. And she's got this great energy, and she's fiercely independent, and you know this book was a hard sell. No one wanted to buy this book. But she did, and so it's paid off for her, I hope.

I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.