It's not that I don't enjoy other people, but what I find with writers is this back and forth. And also, there's no need to talk about work.

My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

I think their pasts are treated with a voice that sees their role as those of innocents. That's reflected in the past time sequences. They're less "written."

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap. It's like spelunking. You kind of create the right path for yourself. But, boy, are there so many points at which you think, absolutely, I'm going down the wrong hole here. And I can't get back to the right hole. I'm not going to be able to get this section back to the right hole - so I'm just going to have to cut it.