At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

The novel tradition is the closest thing I have to a religion, and being a part of that tradition means a lot to me. I don't really see - I never have seen - why I should have to forfeit that feeling, or hope, of belonging, just because the stories I want to tell are close to my own experience.

I think it's true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling stories about what's going on, which is something you can't do if you're totally caught up in the moment.

In a lot of ways, being a writer is a lousy job - grueling, emotionally taxing, terrible hours, no health care - so if it wasn't about love, what would be the point?

Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it makes you a translator: there are all kinds of things that American parents know about life in America ,and about being a kid in America, that non-American parents don't know, and in many cases it falls on the kid to tell them, and also to field questions from Americans about their parents' native country.