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.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.

Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists.

Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.