The old and honorable American notion, that a person who works hard should be able to live in freedom and security, with dignity - seems to have taken on a secondary status.

[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.

In a sense my whole life as a writer is trying to find structural ways, or formal ways, to permit that outflowing so it doesn't just look like crazy output. In other words, if it turns out that you can do a given voice, that's just kind of inclination. But then if you can find a way to put that voice in a story so that the voice serves a purpose, then I would say that's being a writer.

We have not been energetic enough - white people haven't - in pursuing racial equity.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

We've got a real problem with social media that we didn't know we were going to have. It's almost like the demons have gotten out of the box.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.