Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

The balls do not make a writer.

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?