One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

You have to find a way of shutting the future out and focusing on the writing. One of the problems I'll have with writing my second book is getting back into a situation where I think about the words on the page rather than the publishing industry, or success, or any kind of readership I may now have. I'll have to do what writers do, which is focus on the story and nothing else.

I think being consistent is really important. In the arts there's a misconception that you sit around waiting for the muse to come, and that it's all really mystical and mysterious. In reality, sometimes you have to fake it till you make it.

Racial terrorism affects the lives of white people and black people and everyone, everything. Racism is contaminating. It can affect the dogs in the street. So the process of beginning to rid the country of prejudice was in itself a kind of nation-building.

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

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page.