“We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.”

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people’s experiences.

That one lesson that African American communities have learned over the centuries in America is that you can’t just take for granted that things will steadily get better and better and better until they’re great. It is fits and starts. It is backward and forward.

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people’s lives, with real individuals.

There is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes we eat. There are unfortunately unfair and inhumane conditions – including literal slavery – all over the world.

We think, “Well, what are you gonna do?” In a way, that little instinct, that “What are you gonna do?” is the most dangerous thing in the world.

I think it’s hard sometimes for people to grapple with the real-life consequences of political change.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

A book is not a tweet. A book is not a half-hour television show. A book requires for both reader and writer sustained discipline attention. It asks you to immerse yourself in something and really deeply feel it.

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

It is part of what makes America great. That tradition of the free press, and also the tradition of this highly competitive market for investigative journalism. We’re seeing, there’s no question, that we’re seeing a renaissance of that.

I think that if there is a great gift that this [Donald Trump] election gave us, is this sort of sense of vigilance, the sense that we have to remain on guard. We have to support our free press.

One thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump – this candidate first, president-elect, and now president – is that he has this sort of reptilian instinct for rooting out supposed enemies and finding people he can whip up distrust into rage.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

Temperance in everything is requisite for happiness.

And I’ve always said, ‘If two people think the same thing about everything, one of them isn’t necessary.’ We need to be able to understand that if we’re going to make real progress.

Read, read read. Read everything.

We have been told to ask about everything: Will it leave us free?

There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours.

Everything you say and do is having an impact on others.

I am Syrian, I was made in Syria, I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.

The mind is the root from which all things grow. If you can understand the mind, everything else is included.