To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.

When I'm writing, I'm in an isolation chamber. I'm not one to think about that outside world stuff when I'm writing.

For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.

If anything, I was a prodigious eater of everything that was put in front of me. That was probably the only thing my parents wouldn't complain about.

Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.

I think that being Jewish is in some ways unique because there's this conflation of race, culture and religion.