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.

No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

No one will love you more than you love your pain.

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

For the majority of the people it is a difficult place to live. That's a reality that we can't ignore. But there is also great beauty to it.

After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.

When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that's a little something extra between me and them. It's like the Laurence Dunbar poem "We Wear the Mask."