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

The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.

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

Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.

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'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 have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.