If there had never been the Great Migration there would never have been jazz, there would never have been Michelle Obama. A lot of amazing black people exist in this country because of the Great Migration. That's nation-building.

I couldn't imagine a book with many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me. But I also wanted to write that character as a person, not just a gay person.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.