I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.

Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.

This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.

I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.