Most book things now (with a few exceptions) are just built around nice, safe books written for nice and safe book club readers. These are usually the books you see on display at Barnes and Noble. These Internet writers are like literary terrorists to me. They're training as we speak. They're getting ready to invade. They're building an army.

You can write songs about your comic books and the girl or boy you sort of know and your mom and dad and it's all right there in front of you.

It's like that where these little anecdotes come through, and I guess that's what I like about books like that [He Stopped Loving Her Today]. Fiction now is so experiential.

So much of our culture is bought and manufactured - not to say great art can't come out of that. Some art is really amazing that is manufactured and sold, like action movies and stuff.

I guess the things I have always loved are from people who were just being themselves. They were doing these things because they couldn't do it any other way. It was for them.

It's weird. People want you to know that they write. They want you to know they're a musician, rather than making music or making stories. It's the strangest thing.

This [Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original] is another one of those books with the perfect blend of anecdote and analysis. The analysis is built into the anecdote. It has that right feel about it. It's not too scholarly, either.