If you do really good storytelling, things that people also might anticipate and that they might have seen before - there's a reason we go back to stories that we love - so, even if there is a familiarity, if you can do it a different way and hopefully do it well enough, you actually feel the satisfaction of that anticipation given back to you.

I think there are a lot of writers who would never have an opportunity to make their work. Some presses rely heavily on the NEA. Translators cannot support themselves on translating. It would be isolating artistically. It would diminish experimental output. It would have a homogenizing effect on the work that was made.

Again, let's pay all due respect to De Palma and put him over here so we're not saying, "Mine's deeper, mine's better." Let's just say, in reading the book, what I fell in love with was this mother-daughter story that was so amazing and so profound.

I think it's always a challenge when you're telling a story that people know. But hopefully, good storytelling - well, there's two things. One is, you definitely have to have surprises and changes so that people are - you keep them interested, you take them down roads that they didn't expect and give them suspense and surprise.

I think it's why we're able to look at with comic book stories or origin stories, why is it that we can keep retelling these stories over and over? And hopefully it's because it hits something so universal and so primal inside of us that we actually yearn for that same story over and over. But toned and different form, and updated and modernized, and I can go into the specifics.

If I even tell anything false, within one minute I have to come clean. And I think most people, even if they're not that direct, it comes out in indirect ways. If somebody cheats on you, they end up telling you they've been spending all this time hanging out with that person. Why? Because nobody can bear a lie. A lie won't stay silent. It makes noise.

If you're writing in the mainstream... Whatever that is - the norm. The norm is likely going to be funded because you're giving people what they're used to and what they're gonna get. But anything outside of that norm is going to struggle to get funded. The people who are not "the norms" deserve the chance to make art. I think it's great for all of us to consume all these voices, and that happens when you support these voices that need to be supported because they're not the automatic choice coming out of the gate.