My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I'm a little lost.

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

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

There's this de facto assumption that for something to have value, it has to be economically self-supporting - which imposes a very low ceiling on a culture.

Early on, a story's meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so things have to be ramped up.

One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can't tell you how many times a conversation went like this: "We've got to stop these immigrants, because it's terrible." I'd say, "Okay, what personally have you observed about this?" And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I'd say, "Where'd you get your information?" thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, "Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources." Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.