“I’ve lived a very interesting, rich life in America, [but] it wasn’t always like that when it was happening. When I wasn’t getting paid as an editor, when I was working for food, it wasn’t ‘interesting.’ When I had to lie about writing a novel, and had to go and write one, it was painful; it was difficult. When I was stopped by the police, it was terrifying. But as I looked back, it struck me that I had a very rich harvest of American narratives—and this is the quintessential immigrant culture in the world. I thought that the ultimate homage I could pay to America for the gifts that it’s given me… is to tell my part of this immigrant drama that is America.”

“I love that book, [but] if I’m honest, it isn’t the brilliance of the writing, or the brilliance of the story, although there is brilliance in both of those things. It was pure and simply… I’d gone right through school, never once imagining that books could be about us, about people like us. And then I stumbled across this book when I’m fifteen or sixteen, and suddenly I’m reading a book which feels like it’s about my people; it’s about my grandfather; it’s about people who work on the land…

One of the books I read immediately after that was The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, which is still one of my favorite books. It had the same effect on me. I read the story of the boy who loves the old fisherman, the beauty of that relationship and the admiration he has for that old man when everybody else doubts him. [I thought], ‘I want to write a book like The Old Man and the Sea, but about my grandfather as a shepherd.’ Took me about 25 years to pull that off, but that’s really where the idea of my book came from.”