The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!

Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you're using words to express an angry feeling, you're already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday and you're 17 years old.

It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.

I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.

I don't like to say, "Oh, I don't like this kind of music." I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it.