It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

The past is all we know of the future.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that they can trust that what they do learn in the novel will be accurate, because I pay a lot of attention to facts. I do a lot of research to make sure that I'm not giving them, you know, blue moons of Jupiter. It's not science fiction.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.