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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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