The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.

I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.