In White Boy Shuffle, I combined my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Takemoto, who really saved me - I don't think I've ever told anyone this - and my first basketball coach, Mr. Shimizu, into one character. Something about the way they talked about things, and their attitudes, had a huge impact on me. Not that I necessarily agreed with them. It was important to me to just put them there to stay grounded.

I remember going to see Amiri Baraka. It wasn't actually too long before he died. He said, "You've got to write to change the world!" I was like, "Not me, no, no, no, no."

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.

I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

Contradictions make people feel off. They'll say, "Hey, you just said this and now this person is doing that, how is that possible?"

The other thing [my psychology professor] said to me was that I was always very mindful of the person who was away from the group, that I was always trying to bring them in.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.