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 want a theory to come out to guide policy.

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

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

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.

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.