I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level.

I think of myself as a narrative artist. I don't think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of those modalities of processing and experiencing narrative are obviously very different, and I'm not sure that I prefer any one to the other. I think the novel gives you the opportunity to have a kind of interiority that you can't have in the theater, which is pure exteriority.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.

I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.

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