"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs, you have the privilege of not being a slave.'"

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."

"I think of myself as an archaeologist, digging through the past to find the truth."

"If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else."

"My work is to make sure that the people I'm writing about are human, and that they are complex, and that they are not stereotypes."