I was feeling like I'd been born in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I don't believe that anymore, not coincidentally two years after writing Eileen. I think that was the driving curiosity for me, thinking about real and fictional characters who could respond to that problem.

If you look at the horror genre, that work is all about making people uncomfortable by stimulating our fear of death.

The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person.

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

I don't think there's anything wrong with pity. Like if you saw a dog having just been hit by a car, you would pity that dog. But then what do you do? Do you leave it there to get run over by more cars, or do you step into traffic and hold up your hand? Stop! An animal has been hit! and carry the thing to safety?

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.

For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience.

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 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.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

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

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.

For me, I enjoy intimidating people and I enjoy being intimidated. It is exciting. It's cool to have an experience with someone where you challenge them, and they are afraid, and then they love you and they've grown. When that happens to me, I feel so blessed if somebody has opened my world up a little bit more.

I've always really enjoyed sharing my work with others. I find it really hard if I don't think the work will exist outside of my own apartment.