As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.

I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

I'm not in the service business.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.