When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

They say behind mountains are more mountains.

The people did not elect me. I speak with one voice that may echo other people, but I am part of a group of people. That's not distancing yourself from a community, that's also allowing the space for others to speak for themselves.

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.

I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.