Sometimes the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty. And if you were angry, they would call you the Devil.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. And I said they don't know nothing. Imagine something. Do you know what it's like to be a Madame in Paris, when you're too old to have any clients. No, you don't. I don't either. Write about it.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

I don't think one parent can raise a child. I don't think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.