When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.

I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?

I've never let the criticism deter me.

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.

The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.