Contempt is a dangerous emotion, luring us into believing that we understand more than we do. Contempt causes us to jeer rather than speak, to poke at rather than touch.

If a book isn't teaching me something, pulling something out of me, then it will be dull for me and the reader.

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

As a writer, I try to turn my feelings and experiences into a different form entirely, something that gives me mastery over them and also makes them meaningful to other people.

Like most people, I find my own experiences - and my emotional responses to those experiences - fascinating and mysterious, even those that are a bit shaming and a little repellent.

Everything in a novel has to be intentional, even the things that aren't.

That's sort of the amazing thing about writing something down and then having it printed and published - it's frozen. It's there. It's set. It's in ink. It's done. Nothing changes it.

Where I live, it's better to write in the morning because the night is really, really, really dark, and I do believe you'd go mad if you weren't asleep for most of it.

By the time I was 14, my most burning ambition was to leave my home, leave my neighborhood, leave my city. I kept it a secret wish. It was easier done than said. It wasn't only that I wanted to leave Chicago - I wanted to live in New York City. And I did - for a time.

I was raised in a house on the far South Side of Chicago, in a development erected on a landfill made from slag and other industrial by-products a few years after World War II.