My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.

I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

I like to say I had a very varied undergraduate education. I was an English major first, and then at the end of my college career I decided I was interested in urban planning. I became an urban studies major, with a minor in poetry. I don't think I knew what I was looking for in my early twenties, but I know I kept not finding it.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.