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.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

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 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.

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

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

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.