Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face.
Elvis, stop dat! You know it is taboo to whistle at night. You will attract a spirit.
Here’s the thing: You rescue us every day in small, quiet ways, so why not in this way? Let us into your mystery, tell us how you would like to be loved, show us how to see you, really see you.
I truly believe that writing is a continuum – so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better.
I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don’t know that there’s anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.
Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is. We seldom play games – we aren’t that sophisticated.
Your anatomy is a mystery that nobody bothers explaining to us. Even when we think we have mastered one woman’s body, every body is different.
I think it’s an aggregation of all of the small acts that are really transformative. I think a group of small acts transform the individual. And maybe when the individual transforms, collectively we transform.
Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.
There was a positive side to not trying at something: you could always pretend that your life would have been different if you had.
As with much of the world’s problems, they become public – or much more of interest – the moment they begin to impact the West.
Anything a man can do, I can fix.
I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.
You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.
All my characters exist in risk, in the places we are either too afraid to go to, or have enough privilege not to have to, but whatever the reason, these characters I fashion go before us and come back transformed for us. For me, at least.
Narrative is a very feeble weapon in the face of human darkness and yet it’s all we have. That we have to hang the transformation and survival of our species on the journey and transformation of one singular person so far outside of what we expect they can do.
If there was no risk, it wouldn’t be art. It wouldn’t be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.
Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.
Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice.