My strong suit is that I've been willing to risk on the page to get somewhere interesting.

I've been writing forever, 20 years.

My weak suit is whatever each reader hates about each book.

My strong suit is that I've been willing to risk on the page to get somewhere interesting.

I'm really suspicious of anybody who comes in and says, this is your identity now, or this is your belief system, and now that you have this, everything's going to be great.

Everybody just gets on my nerves after like, 10 minutes, you know.

I look white to a lot of people. And I'm not. I'm African-American. I'm mixed. I like to call myself Mulatto because that definition fits. So, you know, I've dealt with the conflict my whole life between how I look and my actual ethnic and racial identity.