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

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 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.

Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we're doing, and the extent to which we are guided or manipulated by forces that are beyond our control.

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