I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.

I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.

When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.

My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.

I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has lived there for generations.

I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.

My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was a way of making that wish real.

My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.

After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.

While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.

My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.

I was a freshman at Stanford University the first time someone called me a 'bama.' One of my new friends from D.C. said it, laughing, and even though I didn't know what it meant, exactly, I got that it was some kind of insult. I must have smirked or shrugged, which made him laugh harder, and then he called me 'country,' too.

I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.

Because everyone grows up together in my small hometown, everyone knows everyone else. And there are such large extended families that a lot of people are related to each other.

My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.

Confidence definitely did not get me here! More of, like, desperation.

If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.

Physical books are still my favorite, but I own an e-book reader. They're convenient for travel.

My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.

I am grateful to the activists and women who created the Black Lives Matter movement because I feel like they let me know I wasn't crazy.

I dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.

For a party of the left to win, people have to have believe that government, the state, can be on their side. When I was a young mother, Sure Start and tax credits weren't just a financial lifeline, they represented hope.

My family is just like most other families - we rise and fall on good and bad government policy. Politics affects us all.

If you cut me I bleed Birmingham. Others would say it's being a woman, but coming from Birmingham is the single most important part of my identity. I'm not always sure I feel English or British, but I always feel like a Brummie.

I loathe and detest people who pretend they don't care what people think about them as if that is a virtue, when it is simply rude.

I am manic and that leads me to behave badly at times.

I made a decision to stop feeling envious of other people, to crack on with my life and stop comparing myself with others.

Growing up with my father was like growing up with Jeremy Corbyn. He still hasn't rejoined the party; it's not left wing enough for him.

Fear and hatred can be the things that drive you. I don't always think of fear as a bad thing, it gives you fight-or-flight.

To be honest, I've always been forthright.

I've never bent the knee to anyone in my life.

We have got to be brave and bold and bring people with us, not try and look all ways. Trying to please everyone usually means we have pleased no one.

Ah, well, I do think the generation that came after me has changed. I think there is a growing sense that young women should like themselves a bit more.

I will stand up for all of those who feel they can't stand up for themselves.

I am apoplectic that people no longer expect progress because for so long they have worn the clothes of decline.

Because I sometimes shopped in Waitrose, I thought I was actually quite posh. I've realised that I'm basically a scullery maid. Even the middle-class people who I meet in parliament, people who live in London - which I think is remarkable because how can anybody afford to live there - seem much, much more middle class than me.

I think power will do anything to survive and one of its main techniques is the rule of exceptions. So it makes an exception out of people and we worship them, whether that's Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. These people become beatified beyond recognition.

I am Left-wing. I am a socialist. I believe in sharing wealth. There's no two ways about it.

I'm the kind of leader who would try to have honest and difficult conversations.

I like to go camping with my kids. I've got an amazing group of friends. Just like any 30-year-old woman I like to go out dancing, eating food, drinking with my mates, like any normal person.

I was born in Birmingham and raised in Birmingham.

Every time I speak out about anything feminist I will be shot down by people calling me fat, calling me stupid. And it's all because I am speaking from a feminist perspective.

All my life I've been interested in politics. I went on the miners march when I was six months old. My parents are really political.

I've made a career out of being able to talk about difficult things, and that comes from growing up in an environment where nothing was embarrassing.

I had pneumonia when I was 18 months old and I was given penicillin, which I was allergic to, and since then my teeth have been yellow.

The NHS was hard to deliver, so was the minimum wage. It's time now - we need to have a proper conversation about how much is the individual cost, how much is the burden that we're all going to share together, and how much are we going to put on older adults now versus a future system like national insurance.

One of the things I want to achieve in the potentially short time I'm in Westminster is to stop people thinking we're all the same. Because while they believe that, the establishment stays in the same people's hands.