The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.