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I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right.

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.

The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.

In Rikers, you had the Italians over here, the Spanish over here, the Blacks here, then there would be your Christians here and your Muslim brotherhood here. It's just like the outside, but in very closed quarters where you have to get along or else. The sense of claustrophobia in 'Orange is the New Black' - that's real.

'Sanctus' deals with creation myths in every culture. It fascinates me that all cultures, evolving independently, have similar models of mankind's origins, of a Greater Being, of the flood, and so on. It's amazing how they crop up time and time again.

Now whatever the origin of this apparently meaningless jumble of ideas may have been, it is really a perfect and very slightly allegorical expression of the actual present views we hold today.

Mulan is so important in Chinese folklore - a fearless girl who cared about her family and country so much that she was willing to join the fight and sacrifice herself.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.