I've never been particularly good at explaining or even understanding what this sort of rage is that is so accessible to me. I'm not an out-of-control person, but I can access in my work very easily a feeling of real fury. Thank goodness I've channeled it into my work, I guess.

It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.

I grew up in the '70s, and I hear in my own stuff a lot of what I grew up listening to, which is to say I hear a lot of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder.

I never wanted to write 'Mamma Mia!' or 'The Book of Mormon' - they're not my thing, I don't care about them. What I do is very different.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

I don't know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

To put it simply, I’m not interested in making comfortable films, and I don’t want to crush the audience’s imagination. I want them to feel like they might have missed something."