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

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 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'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.

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'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 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.