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

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

My grandfather is Portuguese. He betrayed what was expected of him and married my grandmother of African descent on my father's side.

If you created a place in air where they're breathing and running around in, and then they speak in that fictional milieu, it's perfectly authenticated because the whole world relies on you, who've made it possible.

To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.

I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that.

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.