Certainly I had from an early age a sense of the power and beauty of religious texts - the awesome magnitude of the Bible stories I was reading as a child. The hymns. The sermons. I can still vividly hear the sermons and the pieces of soft piano music played after them, the preacher asking if anyone wanted to come up to the altar and accept Christ as their savior.

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.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that's just your life. There is no sort of place at which to arrive, and I think that the more one focuses on an end point, the harder it is to get there. It's like the horizon, sort of ever receding, ever receding, ever receding.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

There were class differences among black people then and there are class differences among black people now. There is still an assumption among many people in American society that being black is its own class, a blanket class. That, I believe, is an erroneous and deeply offensive view.