No one wants for their child to become a refugee. It's an awful experience.

If you're a so-called minority writer, the temptation is to write for the majority... I refuse to do that.

By college, I had a really grand, preposterous vision of myself as becoming a writer, but I don't think I had the discipline or the patience - or the ability or the humility. It took 20 years to acquire those things.

I think my parents' lives are worthy of writing about. I don't think my life is particularly worthy of writing about.

People might like to think a war is done when a cease fire is signed, but for most people who lived through a war it goes on for decades.

The refugees are not only going to be a demand on the country's resources, but also the refugees raise the possibility that the countries that they're going to are themselves not as stable as the citizens would like, I think. We're all just one catastrophe away from ending up as a refugee, and we don't want to be reminded of that.

People may be vaguely aware that there's suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan, but simply because the media are filled with American-centric versions, we still see the experiences through the American perspective. We are just completely ignorant of what might be happening to other people.