I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.

That one lesson that African American communities have learned over the centuries in America is that you can't just take for granted that things will steadily get better and better and better until they're great. It is fits and starts. It is backward and forward.

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone's mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

I think it's a very stark marker of what kind of president we have that, from all available evidence, Donald Trump has not read a book, as an adult. This is not someone who sits down in the evening to consider the latest bestseller, let alone Tolstoy - but who is very very active on this medium that requires no discipline and no attention and no empathy. It is all about retweeting praise of oneself or very quickly or poorly considered, ill-typed, misspelled diatribes against other people.

A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.