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 think a lot about race and the burdens of representation. There's an idea that because I'm writing a book set around the time of the Great Migration, and happen to be black, I'm trying to write a definitive account of the Great Migration, the so-called "black experience." That's not what I'm doing, and it can be frustrating.

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.

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.

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.

There's a stereotype that to be a strong black woman is to be strong about being black.

A belief in God may not be fully within me anymore, but there's still a belief in belief. The high drama and power of the Church has stayed with me. As a child in church, I saw grown men at the altar crying out for God's mercy. And the idea of someone doing that has become a joke in the popular culture, but when you are there and you see it, you experience - for a moment - an incredibly raw, honest, strange insight into what it means to be a human being. Those experiences don't leave you. Whatever you think of them, they are powerful experiences.