I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.

I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.

My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

I'm fascinated with video games, though I can't really play them. It's definitely an art form that intrigues me to no end, though.

Stand-up comedy had an interesting effect on me in terms of how I started to think about constructing things, because I really loved the interstices, the linkages, or lack thereof.