For years I felt that I wasn't ready to take on slavery. It's a huge topic, and I didn't want to mess it up.

There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.

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.

These days I find myself wanting to avoid being pigeon-holed, ghettoized, held in a different category than other authors. And when people ask me if I'm a black writer, or just a writer who happens to be black, I tend to say that it's either a dumb question or a question which happens to be dumb.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

In terms of why everything is different, each book is different than the one before because I'm so bored of what I just finished I want to work on something different. The next book becomes an antidote to what I did before.

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.