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."

To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.

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."

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

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

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

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.