People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

If you created a place in air where they're breathing and running around in, and then they speak in that fictional milieu, it's perfectly authenticated because the whole world relies on you, who've made it possible.