"I changed the channels. The news was on over and over. They were talking about that goddamned arsonist again. Someone had been setting crack houses on fire over in the black part of town. They had set another one just now. This made eight."

"If I were to even write it today, it would be a very different book. It might be better in some ways, but it would be probably less emotionally true to how I was feeling."

“[The Daniels] work is vital because they each add a necessary extension to what it means to be human. And when grouped together, The Daniels offer a clear retort to that well-intentioned if ill-informed statement: ‘A lot of people of color don’t know their family history.’ Ultimately, people of color do know their families, especially if we continue to find and share the writers who make us come alive.”

“Writing really resists optimization and that’s partly why I love it. It makes me reevaluate how I conceive of ‘time well spent.’”

“This isn’t some soft, sad Subway sandwich. The bread has integrity and the filling is the consistency of the most robust tuna salad Susie has ever seen, rich from the ratio of mayo but counterbalanced by the crunch of blitzed banana peppers. It tastes like a late night snack and lazy lunch all wrapped into one.”

It is difficult to convey just how important the Tower Records at the corner of Broadway and East 4th was to the feel and pulse of downtown New York, especially in its early days when there wasn’t much of either south of 14th Street.