“While the characters themselves have villainous aspects to them, the true villain that we have to take down is colonialism.”

“But this was like pure hard evidence. I could not deny it.”

“I feel very guilty about the fact that until recently there was a lot of stuff I didn’t see. As a writer, you’re supposed to try to see things that have been rendered invisible and make them visible on the page.”

“I want to do what I can to preserve the Earth because the Earth is in danger. I think my writing contributes to that task, and I’m proud of that and I want to continue it.”

“Writing was a release valve. Like rock, paper, scissors, shoot—sometimes it felt like grad school was drink, write, shoot.”

“There’s often something that people know already to be true, and that they know they need to talk about, and that they really don’t know how to or don’t want to talk about. I love saying those things out loud.”

“I kind short circuited my own castle of protections and just did something really impulsive, which was in this case eating this random mushroom that I found.”

“Our history, our ancestry, constrains us to this very thin sector of the world, which means that it must be an active choice to learn about the rest.”

“The word mourning feels inappropriate for that literal time of mourning I was in for my father. All the associations with that word were not how I was feeling.”

“So many of our concepts and even our words about addiction—like “disease,” or “permanent,” or the idea of a clear us/them dichotomy, or division between healthy and normal—it’s so freighted. There’s so much to be gained just from the process of undoing.”

“There was this free floating belief that the whiter you were, the colder you were, the scarcer things were, the more of them you had, the less of them everybody else had, and the less you talked about any of it.”

“It’s hard not to write whack-ass shit if you’re afraid of looking at the parts of yourself and the people around you that you don’t want to look at.”

“It’s really almost like an oblique decision, like a decision I make with my peripheral vision, with my left hand.”

“I kept thinking of it like, What would it look like for this character to step into her life?”

“While I was in Korea, I realized that this is what I need to write about, because this is where my soul is, essentially.”

“I think the dread is so common, tipping into universal. It’s not true of every writer, but it’s also hard. It’s hard work. It’s hard to be up for whatever is going to bubble up. We don’t know what it’s going to be.”

“This world can be a really rough place sometimes. But you know what, it’s also a great place. It’s also a place full of compassion and love and noodles and ducks, and there’s always donuts.”

“Part of the necessary process was not imagining what was on the other side, giving up a desire to know what was on the other side.”

“It’s a lot safer to do a celebrity profile than to write about a couple of oxen in Cuba.”

“There’s a part of me that will always dream of the revolution, that will always be a believer. I don’t know if that’s ever going to go away.”