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.

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

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

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

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