I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

I'm very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but not illogically, for reasons that could not have been anticipated.

I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.