Novelists From The United States

"People are like, "Well it's not standard English." So what? Standard English is for standard people."

"I get to whisper to them, "I love you, I see you, I know. I know you're scared, and it's OK to be scared, and if you can't be scared out there you can be scared in here. Within the pages of this book, you can be who you wholly are." And perhaps that might be empowering enough to at least add a bit of significance to their lives."

"I don't expect it to be easy, but I'm certain it will be fruitful. My mission is to take a different approach: Instead of explicitly encouraging young people to read, my goal is to get them to see the value in their own narratives — that they, too, have a story, and that there's power not just in telling it, but in the opportunity to do so."

"…And I just remember the pain – the pain of the lost friend but also the pain of meeting a part of myself that I didn’t know existed. A part of myself that could lose control to the point where I could commit a murder. That’s a very human thing. I think that most of us don’t ever meet that part of ourselves that exists within all of us. This rage that, when triggered, will cause you to do things that you don’t necessarily understand that you’re doing."

"My uncle used to say that the good books begin with “… and shots rang out.” Shots rang out is a cliché, but what he meant is that no one has time for you to get us to the minefield. Drop us in the midfield in the beginning. Drop us off in the mix and you can move backward and forward from there. End in the mix. Don’t answer any questions. Leave me in the muck at the end, too. There can be less muck, but all the loose ends shouldn’t be tied up. There should be something unreconciled. That’s life. Nobody’s life is tied up in a bow. Stories that end in a bow are kind of disrespectful to the reader. If you want your story to be compelling, let it fade to black without reconciliation."

"The truths are universal: Every kid knows fear. Every kid knows family and friendship. Loss, love, laughter. Everything else is just detail."

"It's hard to be what you can't see."

"Hip-hop saved me,. It gave me permission to use language in a certain way. It validated my community and my friends. It gave our slang a certain elegance. I have a chip on my shoulder I pet every morning, a constant feeling like I have something to prove. Hearing that the canon can’t be diversified, there’s no room for more brown faces—that fueled my fire. I loved music that people said was not music, that it was too violent, too crass, too sexual. And now everyone in the world is rapping Hamilton."

"I’m proud of young black america. I’m proud of them, even if they are misunderstood. I’m proud of them for using their voices, their way. Racism, classism, fear, it all exists. Still. It’s here, embedded into the fibers of our society. But I have to be honest, I do believe that because of technology, no matter how problematic it can be, and the rapid spreading of information, I’d like to believe there is a slow awakening occurring, and that our babies, or at least the generation after them will have a very different reality here. I know my role is to do what so many have done before me in this tradition — tell the stories, unashamed and unafraid."

"It totally matters to me that teenagers think I'm cool. I mean, teens keep their fingers on the pulse of culture. When things shift, it's usually because they shift them. They call the shots. So if teenagers think I'm cool, then hopefully they'll want to get down with whatever I'm doing. My hope is that reading and writing becomes the new "waiting in line to buy Jordans.""

"Two of my role models are Ana Castillo and Denise Chavez, who draw on their backgrounds for the work they do. They are fearless. I look at them and know I have no excuse."

"Because of that whole kind of philosophy that we Latinos have where your roof caves in, your sink goes out on you, everything bad, but you got to go on with life…Ni modo. No matter what happens to you, you are a survivor. You endure. You keep on going."

"Remember that the Latino, Chicano, Mexican American writers are following in the footsteps of the African American writers. This has to do with the antepasados, the people who have come before you, who allow you to take the steps you need to take. I always thank the Black writers because they gave me a sense of freedom…"

"…If I say I ’m not a Chicana I might as well cut off my arm or my leg. And if I say I ’m not a feminist, well, I might as well cut off my foot. The whole package goes together."

"Being a Chicana is a political, societal, economic and spiritual stance for me because I identify myself with the struggle of Chicanos in this marginal border world of identity—straddling different worlds, the world of the raices in Mexico, the roots, and also the contemporary world of the United States…"

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m moved by voices that ring so true that they make me feel kinship with characters who are completely different from me. As I get older, I also find myself moved by depictions of friendship and kindness, which are so much harder to execute convincingly on the page than cruelty or betrayal."

"The setting, with all of its contradictions, is crucial. The land provides a deceptive promise of freedom, yet also presents itself as a burden. I’m drawn to these contradictions. They feed the emotional intensity of the novel…"

"Fiction is something that I've always wanted to write. I think that I give myself a break when I write fiction. And that's not to take anything away from people that write fiction, because I know that it's just as taxing, and there's so much involved with that. But for me, I write poems because I have to, and I write stories because I want to. When I'm writing stories, I tend to write stories when, like right now, I'm writing a lot of stories because I'm trying to get away from this collection of poems. It's just killing me. But, that's kind of what it is for me."

"I think it’s relative to the story you’re writing. Some novels are filled with summary and some are filled with scenes. Others are a beautiful, confusing mix, of course. Ultimately, I wanted to write a novel that I’d want to read later."

"Once I wrote poems, I found that I was able to piece together individual moments that would, I’d hoped, sometimes compound. The line was the most important thing to me—that and the music it produced."

"I feel queasy about the idea of having non-Asians taking center stage in one of my books. I would feel guilty about it, as if I were trying to deny my ethnic heritage, even though this is precisely what I am suggesting we should be free to do."

"I’d like to see us get to the point where Asian American authors can have Asian American characters and a big deal isn’t made about it, or at least so it’s not the first thing mentioned…"

"A lot of this had to do with resenting the suggestion when I was starting out as a writer that I should write about the Asian American experience and have Asian American characters. I thought the suggestion was, in and of itself, racist, that I was being told I shouldn’t step out of the ethnic literature box, that I should know my place. But I didn’t want to be labeled as an ethnic writer, and I wasn’t interested in writing about being an immigrant or setting stories in Old Asia. I had no connections to those stories. They weren’t my stories. So essentially my reaction to those suggestions was, Fuck you…"

"I think most Asian American writers, especially younger ones, are tired of the standard stories about discrimination and assimilation, or those set in the ancient hinterlands of our countries of ethnic origin. Those stories are no longer pertinent or urgent to most of us. Although we have not yet entered into a post-racial era, and although bigotry still rages on, it’s not something that people want to explore or dramatize in every single book or story…"

"I think the “disfigurement” that Japan inflicted was less the idea of disfigurement, and more the idea of mystery. I’ve managed to finish all that I’ve written because there’s always a mystery at the heart of it which keeps me interested. I think that’s why Japan was interesting, and it seems to me, still, like a strange mystery."

"I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue."

"The voice tends to come first and then everything else follows. It’s never worked for me to think, here’s a character and they should have this kind of voice, let me try to force that. If I can’t tap into a character’s voice, I can’t really write the character…"

"I think that there's every reason for a young woman to feel very strongly that allying herself with a powerful man, regardless of how she has to do it, might be her path forward — might sometimes be her only path forward. And forming that alliance may be a decision she makes when she is less experienced, and a decision that she is able to recognize for how compromised it was later in life, but we still have to recognize that there's this whole baked-in social and cultural structure that's pointing her toward that decision. Just identifying all the "bad men" and putting them into a time-out isn't really going to address the ways in which sexism is baked into our society."

"I believe, behind what’s called “narrative therapy,” which uses storytelling to distance a person from their experiences in order to tell a different story about their lives. Because we often are the life stories that we tell ourselves about who we are; we create the scaffolding that we hang our narratives upon. Is this a treatment? I think so…"

"I do want to be careful not to glamorise mental illness when it comes to creativity because more often than not it actually tends to inhibit creativity…"

"I often say that medicine seems great if you have a broken arm, but if you end up with some more mysterious ailment, or a confusing autoimmune disorder, then you will become obsessed with the color of the coconut water you drink. The more lost I became in terms of my own health, my own mental illness and chronic illness, whether that was named late-stage Lyme disease or dysautonomia, or whether that was named “the mysterious autoimmune disorder that nobody could figure out,” the more I was searching…"

"I have been taking these photographs as I am dead, and then I look back at these photographs to re-experience what it was like, as someone who experienced themselves as a dead person. And they’re the same. It’s very much the same experience, just one is visual and one is more verbal. Both are ways to get through a very difficult experience, and they’re also ways to remember it."

"We do our characters a disservice by allowing them to be flat. Our role as novelists is to do our best to portray the nuance of a whole range of life experiences. It's one of the things that fiction is uniquely positioned to do, to bring the reader into the interior life of people’s experiences that are wildly different than our own…"

"As a Rioplatense person of European decent, I feel strongly about the urgency of retelling the stories of our nation’s histories, the Argentinian and Uruguayan national stories and cultural stories, in ways that fully recognize the presence of black people. Which is a huge part of the greater story of the Americas as well. You cannot tell the story of the Americas without the story of black people and the transatlantic slave trade — that mass atrocity. Alongside, of course, the genocide of indigenous people. And also the cultural richness and artistic production and stories of resilience and power that, too, come out of those harsh realities that are at the origin of the Americas."

"At some point, the novelist has to leap head first into the pool of imagination in order to more freely explore the truth."

"Writing can be a way of honoring those who’ve suffered real traumas and often surmounted them. And when a story has not yet been fully reflected in formal histories, the telling has a purpose, or so we hope…"

"When we're born, our experience is half the time spent undoing these ideas that were placed onto our body since birth and then building a personal identity on top of that."

"I’m existing on all of these different planes: in one moment I’m here, then I’m in the future, then I’m on a slave ship…"

"I just feel left out of the whole possibility of love and romance. I hate that that is related to my race, and I hate that I believe it. I hate that I have felt it for so long, and I hate that white women have it so easy. And it’s not that they are all beautiful or interesting—their face could look like a piece of paper, but there is a cultural perspective skewed towards them. We are asked to compare ourselves to them."

"Some writers want to write something that doesn’t exist within a time, but I’m not interested in that. I want to capture particular moments in time…I’ve always seen my writing as an attempt to document and be specific in that documentation."

"Among Chinese-American writers, two immediately come to mind: Yiyun Li and Ha Jin, with their particular mix of displaced characters, circumstances and past. Their stories often have tragedy, but rise above that. They elicit discomfort and compassion — good and necessary conditions that change me, as any writing is capable of doing by putting me in unfamiliar situations and magnifying the details I would have overlooked."

"There is a beginning, a middle and an end. And I think for those of us who have crossed borders, the artificial beginning is interesting to me. There is a clear-cut — old life, that’s old country, and there’s new life, new country.…"

"I like to think a thought and then I like to follow it, like a little seed, for a long time and see where that growth leads me. Sometimes it leads me to an entirely different place from where it started and that gives me joy."

"I always feel that how people treat animals is not too far from how people treat each other, especially under stress or under certain circumstances…"

"I always used to say strongly that I was not an autobiographical writer, so strongly it was clearly suspicious…Even without this book, I can now say that is just a lie."

"books hold so many memories of the times and places in which I’ve read them."

"(What books would you recommend for somebody who wants to know more about Morocco?) The work of Mohamed Choukri, which I discovered when I was 15, was a revelation. His first novel, “Al-Khubz al-Hafi,” loosely based on his childhood and adolescence, was banned by the Moroccan government, but copies were making the rounds in my high school in Rabat. There’s also a fascinating book he wrote about his troubled and troubling friendship with Paul Bowles, which Telegram Books recently issued in English as “In Tangier.” Another writer I came across in my teens, and who was a huge influence on me, was the late, great Fatema Mernissi, the feminist scholar and sociologist. Several of her books appear in English, including “The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam” and “Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood.”"

"I think of history as a dialogue with the present, so whenever I’m puzzled by the turn of current events — which is all too often these days — I look to the past for context."

"White Americans take that for granted in that they just have to turn on the TV or open the newspaper to see that. That isn’t something that everyone has, so these kinds of stories can be very affirming. As far as representation, it’s an interesting word. It conjures up some kind of necessity. For me, I write what I know. I’m Moroccan so I write Moroccan characters. I write in the specific, not with the burden of representing an entire Moroccan immigrant experience, but just those of my often very-flawed characters. I write in their specificity, with their unresolved conflicts and flaws, and that is how I expect to have any hope of reaching readers and showing some kind of truth that resonates with them. (2019)"

"(about The Other Americans) It’s a book that really questions how we remember one another on a personal level, but also on a public level. You can take an event, like the Iraq war – which figures in the book – and people even today are shaping it and remembering it and contextualizing it in very different ways depending on their views. So history itself is an argument, and we are still litigating it many different ways. (2019)"