I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.