I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

Beethoven introduced us to anger. Haydn taught us capriciousness, Rachmaninoff melancholy. Wagner was demonic. Bach was pious. Schumann was mad, and because his genius was able to record his fight for sanity, we heard what isolation and the edge of lunacy sounded like. Liszt was lusty and vigorous and insisted that we confront his overwhelming sexuality as well as our own. Chopin was a poet, and without him we never would have understood what night was, what perfume was, what romance was.

Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.

Bach and Beethoven, all of them, they had to write something to please the upper structure, those with money and power.

I never listen to music when I write.

I'm one of those people who has to write. If I don't write, I feel itchy and depressed and cranky. So everybody's glad when I write and stop complaining already.