If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.

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.

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

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