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.

I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

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.

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.

One of the things that sparked my interest in this is the case of Emmanuel Constant, who started a militia called FRAPH that was backed by the CIA. FRAPH killed thousands of Haitians in the early 1990s. Now while Constant is living comfortably in Queens, other Haitians are being deported. I wanted to see how those who have been bruised by people like that deal with coming face to face with their torturers.