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.

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don't think that's limited to Haiti.

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

To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

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.

It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.