I don't like talking too much about my personal life, but it all goes into my work.

You can't be a free spirit in a place that feels like it was built on lockdown.

I don't need to feel 100% safe, but I have to feel like there's room for me to go a little bit insane if I'm going to have good ideas. Because a good idea is a new idea and if you start going around like, "I have this new idea!" most people are gonna be like, "I've never heard that before, that sounds fishy."

I want to say that what is cool about writing self-aware first person narrative is that the awareness is not necessarily the same awareness of the reader. I have a story coming out in the Paris Review and it's about a hipster. He think's he's self-aware, he's very introspective and analytical, but when you're reading it you can totally see through his self-analysis because you have a higher awareness than he does. I like playing with that too.

My short stories are so character-based and they're also so private. They're like a private world in each story and I'm getting more and more interested in allowing myself to investigate the big picture about this country, and about human beings, and about the planet, and about the solar system, and about the nature of the material world in general. And I felt like I needed to move into a bigger form.

I hope that I'm the kind of person who would step in between somebody holding a gun at somebody else. I would like to be that stupid. I'd like to be that in love with life.

I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist.