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.

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.

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.

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

I try to be even-handed and fair-minded about my view of history. I don't romanticize one side and demonize the other, though I do think that if you're suffering a lot, especially in the Bob Marley sense, suffering becomes a kind of university out of which you'll learn some hard lessons.

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.

I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age.