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

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

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

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.

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

The first hit on the nervous system is the one I'm most interested in, because I think if you hit the reader emotionally, the reader can't guarantee the lessons they would like to learn.

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.