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.

I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.

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

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.

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

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.