I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.

I feel like my life is at its happiest when I don't have a looming deadline. There's some really groovy wonderful times, when I'm like, "I have a new piece, I'm excited about it, I'm reading all these books about it, but there's not a lot of time pressure, and I'm financially stable enough right now that I don't have to be trying to get another job." But that's so rare.

I never had a lot of ideas. I always have exactly one that is the next project; the idea of a project beyond that project is ludicrous.

I'm terrible at speaking extemporaneously about my work - I get completely tongue-tied and consumed with fear.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow.

For me, being a good creative writing teacher is actually kind of being a good therapist. The line is very porous - you can also be a creepy guru/abusive therapist, too, so you have to be very careful. But it feels really important to me.