I hadn't realized until this week that in [Moses'] youth he killed a man, an Egyptian, and buried him under some sandI used to worry that I wasn't enough like Jesus, but yesterday I remembered who was my king; a man who, when God addressed him and told him to lead the people out of Egypt, said, 'But I'm not a good talker! Couldn't you ask my brother instead?' So it should not be so hard to come at this life with a bit of honesty. I don't need to be great like the leader of the Christian people. I can be a bumbling, murderous coward like the King of the Jews.

My parents are both scientists, and I was raised without god.

I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.

Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something!

I think a lot of people try to edit themselves out and I think that's a big mistake, because the person being interviewed is responding to a person, and if you don't know who that person is then you don't really know what's going on with the person being interviewed.

When I'm editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play.

There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.