I forget how beautiful and calm California is. It's not so much about the place, but also the age that I came to the place and, well, other things. New York is hard.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing these very academic, and, for the most part, serious papers there's just so much going on in her head and heart, and it's a reminder that there's a reason that she's studying these things.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

My British publisher has this independent press. It's pretty small; they actually won last year. And she's got this great energy, and she's fiercely independent, and you know this book was a hard sell. No one wanted to buy this book. But she did, and so it's paid off for her, I hope.

We don't act the same in every situation. Things bleed into all kinds of other things, from behavior to identity.

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