When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.

I didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist.

When the writing is going well, I'm obsessive. I don't shower, I don't take phone calls, I hardly respond to text messages, I don't do email. I take breaks only to read, and usually I read poetry. When it's not going well, I just lie in bed and eat chocolate.