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

I love art because I feel that it's evidence of the great shared universal power. I like art that feels real, that cuts the bullshit.

I prefer reading novels. Short stories are too much like daggers. And now that I'm done with my collection I'm more interested in different forms of writing and other kinds of narrative art. I'm working on a screenplay. But when I was working on Eileen, I definitely felt like I was taking a piss. Like, here I am, typing on my computer, writing the "novel." It wasn't that it was insincere, but there was a kind of farcical feeling I had when I was writing.

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.

Think about every time you've seen someone being objectified, abused, enslaved. We see it constantly on the TV, in magazines, on the Internet. We've become numb, so we do nothing. The accumulation of passivity might make reading about that exploitation uncomfortable. And sometimes when I'm writing, I think of it like this: "People seem to like garbage, so here is what garbage smells like..."

Building a relationship with the character. It's just like sitting with someone you know. It's very easy to predict when they're going to shake their head or say whatever, but because I'm the author I have to make characters do what I want them to do.