With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.

I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

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

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.

To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.

Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led people to survive and take stock and move on with some kind of notion of betterment.