I was interested in the mystical element of humor - was humor part of creation? Is God laughing at us, or with us?

I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.

I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

I am half-Jewish, and yet really hadn't been brought up within the Jewish faith. So I had felt culturally Jewish, if that's possible, without really understanding it.