I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together. ↗
Friends are very understanding when you tell them in April that you can see them next September, but there is a limit to how long you can go on like that. ↗
One of the things that is wrong with America is that everybody who has done anything at all in his own field is expected to be an authority on every subject under the sun. ↗
Most people hugely underestimate the amount of 'empty space' we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass. ↗
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world. ↗