For me, reggae music and its aesthetic are touchstones in both simple and complex ways. Reggae's capacity to be a folk music that is created in a wholly modern context of the recording studio (and sometimes that is the sole performance space) is riddled with the kinds of contradictory impulses that we have come to expect from the post-modern. I revel in this, for it gives me, shall I say, permission.

I believe that all fiction is personal and all writing is at some level personal.

HIV is no respecter of persons. Any of us could find ourselves with the disease, and then what? We tend to stigmatize as a way to deceive ourselves about our invincibility. But it is a delusion.

My concern is always that I can do justice to what I see and hear.

All memory is fiction.

Racist writing is a craft failure.

I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.