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."

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue?

To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.