Race totally matters. Race totally changes your point of view. It's a different experience.

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

It would be pathological narcissism to assume that that person had to live how I live.

I, as the writer, can be very clear that I am writing a work of heightened fiction, as opposed to documenting horrible things that happen every day in the world. Which I have no interest in doing.

One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.

We often do to people what people are very comfortable with doing to animals without a second thought.

What I enjoy about my work is that it's all things that I wanted to see as an audience member so there's part of me that understands what an audience wants to see in that respect.