The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music."