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

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?

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

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.

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.

I usually feel something before I know it.