Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author in the world. I love him so much. There's one book that informs me more than The Road - it's called Suttree. That book is a huge influence on me. I'm not smart enough to emulate him, but he inspires me. He never infiltrates my writing directly. He writes incredibly intelligently about people that are marginalized.

I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.

But mostly I remember every morning before school. How she'd say "Hey, honey!" just I was walking out the apartment door. And me stopping and turning around and saying "What?" And her saying "I love you." And me rolling my eyes like I just wanted to hurry up so I didn't miss the bus. I'd start going again and she'd say "Hey, honey!" and I'd pretend I was so annoyed 'cause she was wasting time and I had to go catch the bus. And how secretly it was my favorite part of every day.

Growing up as a mixed-race kid myself, when you are in the middle of it and you're young...you don't think about it consciously. It's your reality.

People always think there's this huge hundred-foot-high barrier that separates doing good from doing bad. But there's not. There's nothing. There's not even a little anthill. You just take one baby step in any direction and you're already there. You've doing something awful. And your life is changed forever.

Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author in the world. I love him so much. There's one book that informs me more than The Road - it's called Suttree. That book is a huge influence on me. I'm not smart enough to emulate him, but he inspires me. He never infiltrates my writing directly. He writes incredibly intelligently about people that are marginalized.

Being the first to go to college in my family was a great thing, but it was also a source of guilt. I felt like almost a sellout going to college.