No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

Most people dont think about race as much as I do. They dont have to.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

I rarely talk about work with writers, and I love getting together with writers. I think writers are great to get together with, because we can talk about everything. I think that's why I enjoy it. Writers tend to be pretty open-minded, and pretty profane and loose. They have fun minds.

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.