Nerd Choice

"As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn’t. Gogol didn’t. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Did Camus? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant. That’s why we’re able to feel sympathy for, you know, a dog who has a puppy in its litter that died; we can feel for that, and write about that. I’ve never seen that, I just see things sometimes in my mind’s eye. I guess it sounds sort of hippie, and probably is, but I do feel that we’re all part of the experience. So in that way, I guess you don’t have to compartmentalize. You could just kind of let it all be."