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

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

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

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

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.