There's always an attack on the sophomore novel from some quarters.

'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.

I'm always trying to switch voices and genres.

I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.

I envied kids who played soccer and football, but that was not my gig.

In the apocalypse, I think those average, mediocre folks are the ones who are going to live.

I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed.

I like questions that tee me up to make weird jokes, frankly.

There are good writers and bad writers. It's hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out there.

I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others.

I do write about race a lot, but I don't think writers - of any shade or background or whatever - have to write about certain subjects.

People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.

A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye's spinach when I was a kid.

The movie 'Rock 'n' Roll High School' was a sacred text in my household.

If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.

The readership for 'Sag Harbor' was different from people who'd read me before - it was linear and realistic, not as strange as 'The Intuitionist.' Did they carry over to 'Zone One,' a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I'm used to people not caring about my other books.

I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great.

I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.

Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.

In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone.

I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.

Generally, I walk around in a glum mood.

Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out.

In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.

I'm not a representative of blackness, and I'm not a healer.

'Zone One' has one kind of an apocalypse, and 'The Underground Railroad' another. In both cases, the narrators are animated by a hope in a better place of refuge - in the last surviving human outpost, Up North. Does it exist? They can only believe.

I've always thought the Nat Turner story to be very interesting.

I was allowed to write about race using an elevator metaphor because of Toni Morrison and David Bradley and Ralph Ellison. Hopefully, me being weird allows someone who's 16 and wanting to write inspires them to have their own weird take on the world, and they can see the different kinds of African American voices being published.

If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.

I try to keep each different book different from the last. So 'Sag Harbor' is very different from 'Apex Hides the Hurt;' 'The Intuitionist,' which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from 'John Henry Days.' I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

In '82 and '83, that was the rise of the VCR. Every Friday, my brother and I would go to Crazy Eddie's - which was a video store in Manhattan - and rent five horror movies. And that's basically what we did, basically, for three years. Becoming social misfits.

'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.

For me, the terror of the zombie is that at any moment, your friend, your family, you neighbor, your teacher, the guy at the bodega down the street, can be revealed as the monster they've always been.

I was 7 years old when 'Roots' was first broadcast, and my parents gathered all us kids around the TV to learn about how we got here. But it wasn't until I sat down and immersed myself in the research that I got the barest inkling of what it meant to be a slave.

The idea of sacrifice is integral to the John Henry myth. Heroic figures have to die in order for us to have our stories; we live and stand on their bones.

Anytime an African-American writes an unconventional novel, the writer gets compared to Ellison. But that's O.K. I am working in the African-American literary tradition. That's my aim and what I see as my mission.

Part of any book is establishing the rules at the end of the world. My first book, 'The Intuitionist,' takes place in an alternative world where elevator inspectors are important, so you have to establish rules, and part of that is, How do people talk? How do they behave?

Most of my books have always worked through juxtaposition, jumping through different point of views and time.

'Driving while black' was taught to me at a young age.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

Some books are well-received with critics; other books sell.

I was sort of a miserable teenager.

I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour.

I like to explore different ideas of race, how the concept of race has evolved in the country. It's one thing I enjoy talking about, but I don't feel compelled to talk about it.

A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.

I always try to mix it up with each book - changing tone, changing style keeps the work very vital for me.

Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book!