When I write, there is something that I want to say. It can come from these really odd moments of sitting around for months and months and getting very upset about the high levels of black unemployment in this country and feeling only Kendrick Lamar was speaking to that angst, then saying "If I have to get this out to someone, I want to see if someone else wants to engage in this conversation." And so with these heavy ideas you always consider what's the way to make sure all of these ideas I'm feeling get understood? So the writing becomes this larger landscape or a geography of making sense of things. I think about writing as mapping out points of consideration.

From an excellent interview with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, whose profile of Dave Chappelle in The Believer was one of the best things I've read in a very long time.