In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

I've always felt a connection to kids who go to church. I think I'm fundamentally a religiously oriented and religiously minded person. It's very easy for me to communicate with people who have that same grounding, that same vocabulary or modality of thinking and expressing themselves.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.