As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.

There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

The ban on the burkini, which is basically a wetsuit, seems particularly ridiculous.

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

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.