I try to be even-handed and fair-minded about my view of history. I don't romanticize one side and demonize the other, though I do think that if you're suffering a lot, especially in the Bob Marley sense, suffering becomes a kind of university out of which you'll learn some hard lessons.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there.

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.