Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.

Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.

We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain.

People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.

I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.