I don't like stories that are too neat and too resolved. I think resolutions can be deadening for the reader.

My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.

I didn't read about it for school. It was just for myself. I was interested in cults in general but Jonestown was the most interesting of all the cults I studied.

I'm felt I was writing about love and desire and community and belonging and grief and a whole host of other issues. But race is never far from the surface.

I was influenced growing up by everything from Harlequin romances to Fedor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and later Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, bell hooks.

I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.

I'm increasingly less interested in classic storylines and that arc that we have come to expect.

Motherhood. It was hard to get lost in anything else completely when children were 3 years old.

I'm not trying to be coy, but I think everyone notices these things like skin color but some people are more aware that they are noticing them than others, maybe. If that makes sense.

I guess the subject of race is so natural to me I never think of it as hefty. It's something I talk about and joke about and discuss with my loved ones every day of my life.

I think cults never stop being interesting and I'm intrigued by how we all do a tiny bit of submitting to a larger group - and how they can sneak up on you.

For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

The memory of war weighs undiminished upon the people's minds. That is because deeper than material wounds, moral wounds are smarting, inflicted by the so-called peace treaties.

Regardless of anything, my dad wants me to "get that piece of paper!" - degree over everything.

We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.

Pliny the Elder, who when Rome was burning requested Nero to play You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille. Never got a dinner!

Most men make little use of their speech than to give evidence against their own understanding.

Large companies are very good at solving extremely complex problems in a globally optimal way.

The importance of education plays a huge role.

The walls are raised against honest men in civic life.