I would drive on streets that were one-way and think, "Why are they all honking at me?"

I think that you need to have books that talk about the lives of the poor, and they need to be involved - involved in acquisitions.

You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.

I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.

This is the age of fear and so many of us feel afraid to speak out about what has happened to our lives in the wake of 9/11. Television promotes the world as a scary place for the United States and this justifies peeling away every element of privacy we had before. The media is monopolized so we don't even hear a lot of dissent about this new era.

As an artist, I have to be the ambassador of everything.