Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face.

Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.

I truly believe that writing is a continuum--so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better.

Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I've seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology.

If I dont get at least one e-mail every ten minutes, I feel unloved. Even junk mail makes me feel seen. Sad, I know. Sigh.

What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you.

If you encounter a human shadow burned permanently into the concrete in Hiroshima, you realize that this is the trace of a very ordinary person now elevated into the emblematic. Time, shame, complicity, or discomfort are the only things that make us pretend History is impersonal or far removed from the power and consequences of our every lived moment.