My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there’s not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back.
All writing is that structure of revelation. There’s something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don’t need to read further if there’s nothing else to find out.
Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.
The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.
When you deal with a person who’s experiencing dementia, you can see where they’re struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they’re trying to remember.
Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.
I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.
I would have been completely brainwashed by this lopsided and racist view of the world if it weren’t for my father. He was a deep thinker and an irrepressible problem solver. He was a Black Socrates, asking why and then spoiling ready-made replies.
I think that it’s important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don’t think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.
I’m almost completely without family and it’s a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.
Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that’s good.
Losing my parents really set me adrift in more ways than one. It’s not just losing them. It’s losing the possibility of family.
Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn’t make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.
The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.
I have never thought that I have sacrificed anything being a writer. That might not be true, maybe I have sacrificed something. Maybe I’ve given something up, but I can’t think of it.
I never really thought I’d be successful. I never though I’d get books published, but this was something completely beyond me. The fact that it happened is wonderful, but it is not something that I was aiming for.
I write every day and I just love doing it. It’s just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don’t work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don’t fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.
My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.
I laugh, that there’s a certain kind of cyclical nature to life and that I don’t have to worry because whatever isn’t there right now, it’s coming back again.