But then, how could you have any self-respect knowing that you didn't believe in anything exactly? How did you embrace what was yours if you didn't leave something for it? How did you create a life of meaning and pride?

When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.

The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

Jemu watched his father disappear. He didn't throw the coconut and he didn't cry. Never again would he know love for another human being that wasn't adulterated by another, contradictory emotion.