"But one of my most extraordinary experiences as an artist, and I carry it with me still, was on Igbo Landing in St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, where I went to do research on Gullah culture. And I went to meditate, but I went to this particular site, which is off Dunbar Creek, and it’s a place where, the place where a great group of Igbo people had jumped off a slave ship, to avoid being made slaves."

"One of the things about being a writer is that it’s a solitary occupation. One of the great pleasures of my life was the few times when I’ve been it and done it with other people. The most intense version of that was the four years I spent at Harvard working on The Crimson, the newspaper."