Sometimes I would get frustrated, I'd think, "You know, this is a good book, how come no one is paying attention to it?" So it's nice to have some recognition.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

Facts are not truths they are not conclusions they are not even premisses but in the nature and parts of premisses.

If you want a chicken to be a duck, and a duck to be a chicken, you will suffer.

Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource.

The U.S. states that allow for citizens' initiatives tend to have fewer laws and lower taxes than the ones that don't. But the beauty of the system is that it encourages the spread of best practice.

I hate being away, but I understand that for me, that's where the work, the stories are.

It's not really difficult to go from one voice into the next.

You probably love to tell kids to get off your lawn, too.

I always give my bird a generous butter massage before I put it in the oven. Why? Because I think the chicken likes it -- and, more important, I like to give it.

Basically, editing is done in rehearsal and in the writing process and in the acting, so it's very, very tricky, very, very tricky.

I love the classics but there are many new ideas to be made into reality. I'd rather be concerned with my own thing. There are many masters of classical piano so I'll leave it to them.