Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.

My father combined many of the elements that were feared in the culture, but also he was a warm figure, a figure we needed. We depended on him to give us a little bit of strength and courage.

When it's played the way is supposed to be played, basketball happens in the air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams.

As a reader, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I'm thinking, "If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It's done!" It becomes a beach book at a certain point.

I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography - in his work particularly - and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I'm a bit of a maverick now. I'm always trying to push the medium.

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.