I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.

It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back.

America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.

The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.