Jack and Don Quixote are gorgeous and smart, but they are not impressed by my writing career. I try to tell them about my awards and publications, but they just he-haw and chew on my jacket.

I have developed an allergy to apocalyptic fiction, which I know is going to be contentious. I just think a lot of it is very passive.

It was the worst—the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating—writing experience I'd had. I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.

I wanted to be a writer, but didn’t think I was smart enough. Then I looked around at the other wannabe writers who were my classmates, and they didn’t seem like geniuses either, so I figured what the heck, I’d give it a shot.

For the first time in my writing life, I think the future is going to be a better balanced one. The Irish tradition has been very male heavy. It’s going to see these younger women coming through, and they don’t give a damn. It seems that something is over. Some idea of Irishness that doesn’t involve being female is over.

I don't think of my true black gay freakiness as subversive, any more than the true white straight Republican freakazoids out in the heartland think of themselves as subversive, even as they're plotting to replace the government with a bunch of gender normative marionettes and privatize motherhood.

The aesthetic gulf between the kind of stuff I’m interested in and the kind of stuff that is mainstream is so vast that I can’t wrap my head around it.

I’m endlessly fascinated by myself and my past and by what has happened to me and how I’ve changed, and I wanted to show that.

There’s something about putting your brain where you hands are that frees up the word-centers of the mind, maybe a bit like meditating.

The second novel is where things get tricky. All I can say is that it was much more difficult than the first. You become more aware of all the things you aren’t capable of doing.

If I’m working very hard on a project it is important for me to show up at my desk on a regular basis, but also a lot of the work is done at an unconscious level and you want to make sure you’re giving yourself space to do that.

I would say that in the past decades, there weren’t that many comics like this one, in terms of the way it incorporates reader participation, [which is] something I see in manga but rarely see in American comics.

The trouble with plots in novels, the resolving kinds of plots, is that they can move in such a dreary groove. One sees the same old thing coming a mile off — after a strong beginning, the novelist allows the plot to write the rest, letting the old, lazy hook do all the work, instead of sustaining the fresh vision of the beginning.

Many Latin American immigrants could tell us stories if we took the time to listen to them. The trouble is, if we did, and we really took these stories in, it would be much harder to rationalize the billions of dollars spent “securing the border” against a conveniently faceless menace.

The mechanics of plot and the market-driven expectations that drive most American novels kept me from attempting fiction for a long time.

The strengths of a writer also come from said writer realizing how much they suck at certain aspects of writing. Which means you lean hard on the things you can actually figure out how to do. There’s no point in being well rounded.

I’m not ever interested really in people’s parents or their backstory. I mean, some writers — and especially screenwriters — that’s just part of your homework, where everyone’s come from and what their whole psychology is. It just doesn’t get me going.