Occupation: Author Birth: 1962
It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words..
Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have to fold that into what yo….
My British publisher has this independent press. It's pretty small; they actually won last year. And she's got this great energy, and she's fiercely ….
If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch..
In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history..
It makes me think about how you hear these young people say, "I see you, man." Or even if you go and watch some basketball game over the summer and t….
I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that..
I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing ….
Maybe I'm just sensitive to that person who's on the outside..
I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's s….
Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic..
My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate.".
Sometimes I would get frustrated, I'd think, "You know, this is a good book, how come no one is paying attention to it?" So it's nice to have some re….
I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure ..
I don't know exactly what a black Chinese restaurant would be, but I would sure love to see one..
I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way..
There's this line between propriety and how we really speak and how we really think. And I'm just trying to have fun with that stuff..
If I'm in LA, I'm close to home, and that just brings up all these other things, good and bad. There is a reason why I am not there ..
I think, and a lot of that has to do with where I grew up in California; [status] isn't something I think about that much..
The anger and fear are so global. And of course, we live where we live and there's a hierarchy to who is worth what. It's been going on for a long, l….
I've also never written anything really in LA..