It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

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.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.