Being Defiant Can Be A Good Thing

My Characters Are Usually Composites. I Wish I Could Pretend That I Make Up All Of These Characters, But No. I Steal From People. But People Will Say To Me, "oh, That's Me!" And I'm Thinking, No, That's Not You!

I Can Write With Authority Only About What I Know Well, Which Means That I End Up Using Surface Details Of My Own Life In My Fiction.

I Had Consumed A Lot Of American Culture, But I Was Not Quite Prepared For The Reality Of American Poverty.

Richard Exhaled. It Was Like Somebody Sprinkling Pepper On His Wound: Thousands Of Biafrans Were Dead, And This Man Wanted To Know If There Was Anything New About One Dead White Man. Richard Would Write About This, The Rule Of Western Journalism: One Hundred Dead Black People Equal To One Dead White Person.

Each Time He Suggested They Get Married, She Said No. They Were Too Happy, Precariously So, And She Wanted To Guard That Bond; She Feared That Marriage Would Flatten It Into A Prosaic Partnership.