Whenever I went to an historical moment that was sad or where something terrible happened, it was, for me, a learning moment, a teaching moment for those who survived.

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.

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.

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

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 want a theory to come out to guide policy.

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?