Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.