I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.

If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.

You don't want to spend your life writing about stuff that doesn't matter. You want to try to pull out of the temporal mediocre and write in a way that is meaningful to everybody. This goes back to this idea of being intimate with your reader. Since we're all down here and we're all dying and aspiring and loving and feeling inadequate, all these things that we all are doing all the time, what a relief it is, when somebody looks at you and says, "Yeah, me too."

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.