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

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

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

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

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.