There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.

People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.

This was a "bad" example for U.S. slaves. Haiti was subjected to an embargo from the United States, which, along with many other countries, refused to recognize this new republic.

I can't wait for both my daughters to be old enough to read all my books. I loved it every time I saw my parents acting like more than just my parents. And I'm looking forward to that with my daughters too. I am looking forward to having them discover me as someone completely other than their mother.

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

Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.