Distance is where people get really confused. If you stand really far away from someone you're like, "That's not me. I'm so far away from that person. That person is so different from me." It's easy to forget that people - refugees from Syria, for example - are exactly like us.

I think we waste a lot of time trying to convince other people that we're right. A lot of times we don't actually care what another person thinks, we just want to say what we think. To hear it reflected back to us and that we're okay, to hear that we have been understood and that we're correct - so that we can continue to be who we are in the ways we've been being, and we have nothing to feel bad about and everything is just fine. Even if what we're talking about is, like, police brutality.

People have been asking me, "What advice do you have for young writers?" I tell them: a) get off social media; b) don't ask your friends what they think about your work or your ideas. You need to focus and be insane within yourself to build your sandcastle. The mind is so malleable and you need to have a steel trap around it, at least while you're working on something.

You know that's why people don't like unlikeable characters. It's not that they're not interesting. Everybody knows the most interesting character in a book or a movie or whatever narrative is the villain.

Reality is a projection of consciousness, so if you believe - more than just think - but believe, subliminally, that something is true, it will become true because you will make micro-decisions based on the reality that you have faith in.

I don't really pity any of my characters. I hold my characters under a harsh fluorescent lamp and ask "Who are you?" I'm not doing their makeup or giving them hairdos. They present themselves to me as they are and then I let them say what they want. Usually they're saying something too honest.

I live in East Hollywood which is sort of the end of the grit, butting up against Silverlake and Los Feliz which are the refined gentrified hipster zones, which I tend to appreciate when I need to get coffee, but I like living in the grit. I like feeling separate from that elitist civilization in some way, even though I don't really "belong" in the grit either. But I do spend more than half my time now in the desert which is really nice - to be off the grid, remembering that the world is bigger than the city streets.