In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa.To the latecomers are left the bones.