I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.

While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt.

There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it.

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.

You can research until you're falling asleep, but that still doesn't mean you're really fluent in the material.

To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.

I've tried writing on a computer thinking it would make me more efficient, but if you're writing crummy stuff, being efficient is no help.

I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

Invention and memory are so close together in the place they occupy in my brain.

I just think that, for my particular personality, feeling slightly invisible is always a help.

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

I felt unbelievably lucky to have the success I did with 'Goon Squad,' and I also felt the pressure of how fleeting that success can be.

After 9/11, the U.S. seemed vulnerable for the first time in a long time. We were no longer the superpower that no other country could touch. I thought, 'When and how did that dominance begin?'

I never did anything original my whole childhood. I was invisible.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.

I write with pen and paper, my first draft, on legal pads.

I haven't read a lot of science fiction, and I never intend to write it; it seems to happen a little bit inadvertently for me, in that I'm trying to follow people into points in their lives that demand that I investigate the future.

One futuristic novel that had a huge impact on me was Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' which is kind of science fiction plus Gothic.

When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.

Time is always a component of place; you can't really talk about where without talking about when.

Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there.