I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.

My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

Anger is a wasted emotion.

Language is such a powerful thing. After the earthquake, I went to Haiti and people were talking about how [they] described this feeling of going through an earthquake. People really didn't have the vocabulary - before we had hurricanes. I'd talk with people and they'd say, "We have to name it; it has to have a name."

The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.

I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.