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.

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

Once I became historically aware, I realized there are these formative moments of history tied around tragedy and disaster and sacrifice, that led people to survive and take stock and move on with some kind of notion of betterment.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.

I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.

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.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.