I love that India has declared dolphins non-human people with all laws that apply to human. I'm fascinated with the alien-ness of that.

Growing up, there were a lot of funerals that I attended, and the adults at the funerals went out of their way to make sure that I wasn't traumatized or overly depressed by them. So death is always a celebration of life for me, and it's also hugely dramatic.

When I'm at home and I'm preparing my own food, it's all gluten-free, or fish and it's healthy, but when I go to someone else's house, I'll eat what they put in front of me because I don't want to be an asshole.

I love the supernatural in storytelling. The Twilight Zone was a huge influence on me, in terms of writing and storytelling, where you're not restricted to the parameters of reality to tell your tale.

I'm always looking for the idea in a scene or the philosophy that makes a scene worth existing beyond exposition.

Cinema and emotion trump reality for me.

In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.