The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.

I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.

I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.

For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

My grandfather and I were very close.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?

We're all entitled to our superstitions.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.

I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me.

Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?

I heard Davey Havok has a brand of eyeliner out now... its AFI-liner

I wrote the album [Metals] in the fall. In about four months, I went from zero to finished. It usually takes forever.

We often talk to ourselves in ways that we would never let a stranger or even a friend talk to us.

Let us then blend everything: love, religion, genius, with sunshine, perfume, music, and poetry.

Bashfulness is not becoming to maidenhood, though modesty always is.

People developed planes first and then took care of flight safety. If people were focused on safety first, no one would ever have built a plane.

That makes entertaining television. That is the circus of American Idol . We go for the very, very best and the very, very worst. It's the boring people that we don't want to see on television.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.