I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.

I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.