I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.

Part of me is stuck in my childhood in the Eighties. I actually watch 'The Neverending Story,' 'Labyrinth,' and 'Legend' over and over again. Also, 'Willow' and 'The Goonies.'

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

Great trouble breeds great art, I think.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

My mom is the kind of mom, when we would go to a friend of the family's house, and they would offer us something to drink or offer us something to eat, my mother would always say, 'Tell them no.' You could be starving - you could be dehydrated - but as kids, we were supposed to tell the host, 'No.'

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, 'Why can't they speak? Why can't I undo some of that erasure?'

I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer - or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South - was Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple,' which I read for the first time when I was in junior high.

The reason that I like to use classical myths as models is because African American writers and African American stories are usually understood as occurring in some kind of vacuum - because of slavery.

Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

One of the things that is so striking to me about the South, especially living here now as an adult, is that I see a lot more mixed-race couples than I saw when I was growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. I feel like living across the color lines has become something that's more expected.

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.

I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.

It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope.

I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

I'm always curious about other writers' routines.

It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.