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 think Trump has made it really hard for people to read, period. He's made it hard for me anyway. Part of his evil is the way it constantly distracts us, constantly upends our horizon. To leave your computer for three hours now is to miss a year's worth of drama. This is programmatic and common to other autocratic regimes of our times.

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.

This book, 'Free bird', is so entangled with politics. I wanted to channel my own internal political monologue in some way to get it out of my brain. I'm not happy that the themes of the book have become more relevant as the publication date nears. Most of it was written in 2014 or so, before the whole Donald Trump thing began. As people paying attention know, the rise of Trump and Trumpism is not an aberration or sudden kind of phenomena.

I guess I will say, going back to the Judaism questions, there are mental reflexes or patterns that I think of as Jewish in my own feelings about mysticism and theology.Franz Kafka is someone I very much revere. If I believed in holy texts I'd go to him as a touchstone. Not that I read Kafka all the time at this point. In a way, this is what I most want to talk about and it's the hardest to talk about.

I have a feeling the writers who find screenwriting difficult are usually just not lazy enough for the job. They don't know how to stop before the task is done. I've always had a knack for leaving things unfinished, which makes screenwriting easier for me than most.

Why do I have an issue with banks? They have their greedy fingers in everyones money. No other industry has the power to deduct a bill or fees directly from your own bank account without so much as a notice.