I like to be depressing. I feel it's my duty to make everyone a little less happy. You know that line in the Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of happiness"? I've come to think that it has no meaning at all. You cannot pursue happiness. And to think that this bad little sentence has determined our lives.

I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!