Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

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

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.

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.

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat.

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.

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