Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.

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.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

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.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

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.