Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.

...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.

The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.

The ordinary can be like medicine.

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.