When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.

In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.

The reality is that my style of drumming is largely an athletic undertaking, and it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to... take yourself out of the game.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

There's an ancient connection between movement and music. Most languages don't make a distinction between the words 'music' and 'dance.' And we can see that in the brain. When people are lying perfectly still but listening to music, the neurons in the motor cortex are firing.