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.

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.

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 die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

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

If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over.

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