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I'm a sucker for entertainment and escapism as much as the next person. I like silly and lowbrow stuff, but I get nervous when I indulge in that too often. I want to know what's going on in the world. I have a morbid fear of being surprised by bad news. I want to anticipate everything.

When I first started looking at Twitter, I followed people like Steve Martin, who will just write the funniest non sequiturs now and then, which I thought was really fun. That's kind of the road I've taken. Every now and then, something comes into your mind and you put it out there. It's very innocuous. I think it's kind of fun.

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

When I first started as an editorial cartoonist, I was terrified on a daily basis. Filling that hole the next day, knowing that tens of thousands of people were going to expect something funny. There is still that pressure, but you kind of learn how to cope with it a little better.

I like storytelling, and I feel more confident as the years have gone on about my ability to do that.

I think world creation and monster creation and all of that stuff is exciting as a secondary element of storytelling. When it becomes more important than storytelling, I get very nervous, and you sort of lose me a little bit.

It took awhile for me to get used to speaking candidly about my own life. I got into it, and it turned out to be a wonderful experience.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out.