As a journalist, the details always tell the story.

I'm proud of 'Miracle at St. Anna' and I loved it; there's no question in my mind it's as good as any movie that came out in 2007.

I can write anywhere really. I have a hard time writing when the birds are tweeting and the brooks are running outside. I've tried that several times, for months at a time, trying to write in a quiet, wonderful place where birds are twittering and coffee's brewing. And nothing happens. But if I'm in an old dump like my old apartment and I can't find my fingernail clippers and nothing's working except the old tea maker, that's just great. You always have to find and live in a place that's a little uncomfortable when you're a writer. You need a burr in your side.

Music and writing do fold together in the sense that you have to have a certain level of skill in order to execute your ideas and you need a medium. The idea of improvisation is one that many writers fall into, and I improvise a great deal when I'm writing, but there's a structural framework that I'm working around, and that takes more time than the actual writing. Once the characters get to yapping and talking, they'll move from one room to the next, and I just have to make sure that the house is built. That's really hard, that's the kind of thing that sits with you all day long.

I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.

What humor allows you to do is to let the past go with less pain. It's a healing element. It releases some of the pain from the shotgun wound.

Slavery was a web of relationships, and if people knew how thick the whole business was, they would not make fun of people like Harriet Tubman. They would understand how intelligent she was and how sharp.