To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.

With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.

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

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.

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there.

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