No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.

After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.

The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.

I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.