What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels' teeth. It's a black box.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

I'm trying to keep it fresh for me. I'm just trying to not bore myself. And if I can do a detective novel, and if I can do a horror novel, then why do it again? To keep the work challenging I have to keep moving.

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone. It meant knowing you are property that could be sold to the highest bidder, of value only to continue to support the plantation economy.

If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.