Then Jesse made me mad, so we went on ahead of him. I told him not to follow.

I know what he was thinking. 'If I can't beat this train, my name isn't Jesse McDonald.' He is always taking chances. He wanted to be different.

We don't play games. We were just going to a friends house. Everyone says we were playing chicken, but we weren't.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing - not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.

I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.