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It was really great to be part of the Philip Roth story as a woman in a very complete way.

Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society.

My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness - as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my 'Vogue' office will concur - began in infancy.

The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people.

The subject of an outsider who becomes obsessed.

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.

The writer's room is a really interesting place to be.

I was trying to take the band in a direction that I thought was appropriate, and Roth was trying to take the band in more of a Las Vegas direction. And there he is.

'The Glass Castle' by Jeannette Walls is the quintessential dysfunctional family.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.