I remember a point in [writing] the story where I said, "This isn't working, I should go and buy something at the supermarket or my wife will kill me." Then I said, "No, I'll go on."

I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human. I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic. When I see this kind of stuff, I think, they're smart, but I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

I was first introduced to Kafka's writing during my compulsory army-service basic training. During that period, Kafka's fiction felt hyperrealistic.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.

When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.