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

I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.

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

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.

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 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.