My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."

Well, it's not all the same, but there are a lot of parallels. I'm not sure how to answer [on psychology background], but I think when I was studying psychology I had a professor and a friend who would talk about "process" all the time. Your process, his process, the group's process. There's some carryover from that discussion to my creative work.

I've also never written anything really in LA.

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

I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"

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.