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

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.

We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

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."

The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.