People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way..

I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that..

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person..

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you….

If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over..

Whenever I went to an historical moment that was sad or where something terrible happened, it was, for me, a learning moment, a teaching moment for t….

Much of the visualizing is imaginative..

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing..

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat..

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life..

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think..

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it..

I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesso….

Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you unde….

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a wri….

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions..

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and the….

I try to be even-handed and fair-minded about my view of history. I don't romanticize one side and demonize the other, though I do think that if you'….

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there..

I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age..

To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that,….