I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.

In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.

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

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."

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.