I would never ever condone any violence of any kind. But in the theater of fiction, blood is delightful.

We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

I found once you start writing about God it's really fun. It's like a rock singer saying "baby." "Baby, baby, baaayy-by." You start saying "God" on the page and you don't want to stop.

My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and his life and history were very formative to myself and my family. The almost unimaginable dichotomy between the different eras of his life always crushed my brain on some level. That this guy who was shoveling carob chips out of a barrel and restocking yogurt popsicles could also have those numbers on his arm. It was an inconceivable juxtaposition. His experience was the main window for our family into any kind of social consciousness, or sense of history, or politics, even though a lot of it went unsaid.

I've often said, not totally jokingly, that screenwriting doesn't really qualify as real writing at all. You don't string sentences into paragraphs. You don't maintain a constant breath, or create internal rhythms, or even develop a fully-formed thought. The camera does all that work for you!

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

I'm the type of spiritual person that doesn't speak openly about their spirituality. Irony is probably my religion.