I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

[Writing] is almost like those boats that sit really low in the water; they look kind of ugly. And then you get one of them up to 80 miles an hour and the hull comes up, and it's a beautiful thing. I'm okay with that for myself.

You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.

You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.

In fiction, conceptualizing, I've found, produces dull and over-controlled text.

Equality has always been extant but some of us just didn't know it.