I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.

There are a lot of people who wonder why Japan is a pretty consistent influence in my music, and I think it's because the reason I started writing - my intro to electronic music was Japanese music.

You don't look at a painting and ask if the artist was gay or straight. I think it's irrelevant in any situation - I don't care if my garbageman is gay or straight as long as he picks up the garbage.