Every time you draw something, much like acting, you have to get into the role on some level of what that person is thinking or feeling. It’s easier to draw a sadist. The more difficult thing is to draw ordinary people doing atrocious things.

I write my texts, my sentences, in my head — outside there is a terrible, almost unbearable noise, inside there is a terrible, almost unbearable, pounding silence.

I was so hoping that we could get beyond the whole gay writer thing now, which I feel stuck in.

"There’s a very offensive Islamophobia that happens in the media. But then there’s also this overly-PC, liberal reaction to tiptoe around a lot of subjects which I think is its own form of insult."

"The parts of Solzhenitsyn that are funny aren’t there because he artificially introduced them. They're there because he’s trying to authentically replicate what life was like. And I’m trying to do the same."

Good picture books are meant to be read more than once in order to be properly understood, and the artist takes advantage of the brevity to insert layers of ideas, one on top of another, rather than set out along a linear string.

I just feel we know when we see someone with buckteeth and super slanted eyes that that’s supposed to be outdated. Right? But then a lot of these sorts of things keep popping up in our culture.

"After I recanted my false confession, my main interrogator essentially told me he knew I was not a spy. My captors may have wanted to use my false confession to intimidate Iranians advocating better relations with the West. They may have also wanted my false confession to reinforce their claim that America had planted spies throughout Iran."

We had to learn Russian. We had to learn marching songs. In my case, I had to watch the Hungarian Secret Police drag my parents away. So kids grow up really fast in that kind of a system. At age six I already knew what I could say outside our apartment, and what I couldn’t. Sometimes I made mistakes.