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.

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.

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

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

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.

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