I'm, by nature, a really optimistic person. It goes back to my parents having been each divorced three times and my finding some way to survive all that. I always managed to survive by being upbeat.

Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.

In real life, there are right-wingers, there are anti-immigrant activists who want to overturn this constitutional right that we have to become Americans when we're born in this country. There's lots of people who believe that this has led to the phenomenon of the anchor babies. I am an anchor baby. My parents were able to receive their residency and citizenship because, I, a U.S. citizen child of theirs, was born in Los Angeles.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.

I'm, by nature, a really optimistic person. It goes back to my parents having been each divorced three times and my finding some way to survive all that. I always managed to survive by being upbeat.

I just feel that art is more important than ever, that art is something that can unify us, that can make America stronger.

I write, fighting for every sentence, fighting to hold the reader with every paragraph.