I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

I think criticism, or a critical engagement with history, has a good deal to do with a willingness to be fooled.

It's very lucky when you have an artist - whether it's a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer - whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.

When I'm struck by things, I want to hear more and find out more. I remember when Lana Del Rey was on 'SNL,' this supposedly disastrous performance. She's doing this pretentious torch song, and I thought, 'I don't know what she's doing, but it's really moving me.'

When someone hears that I've written a book about 1897, I'm usually met with blank stares. And the first thing they say is, 'Was there even an L.A. back then?' A lot of people don't even think there was a city before the movies appeared. That concept of Los Angeles is so strong in the popular imagination that celebrity overrides everything.

Being dyslexic, creativity was my way of expressing myself.

Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.