I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

More and more people are able to access information - thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago.

Jephthah called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, 'Let me cross over,' the men of Gilead asked him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he replied, 'No,' they said, 'All right, say Shibboleth.' If he said, 'Sibboleth,' because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Fourty-thousand were killed at the time.

I think we all wear some kind of mask. There are masks that shield us from others, but there are masks that embolden us, and you see that in carnival. The shiest child puts on a mask and can do anything and be anybody.

There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”