Reading feeds writing: it presents you with new ideas to engage with.

My parents did give me a lot of books - biographies of Marie Curie - and I did read them, because I was interested.

My mother wrote a teen column for the South China Morning Post in the 1950s when she was growing up in Hong Kong. Her name was Lily Mark, but she sometimes wrote under her confirmation name, Margaret Mark. That was how she met my father.

I am a first-generation Chinese-American; my husband is white. We have a little boy, so I think a lot about what it's like when people from different cultures and backgrounds start families, and how the world sees them. Most of my friends are in interracial relationships, and I just wonder what the world is going to look like for their children.

In the case of 'Everything I Never Told You,' my goal was to make the experiences of a family that had always felt marginalised feel accessible and understandable even to people who'd never been in that situation.

Local politics is just as important as national - and often easier to influence.

Books by women, people of color, LGBTQ authors, differently abled people, and non-Americans are a great way of broadening horizons and building empathy.

As the Trump administration takes office - and we see acts of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination around the country - ask yourself, 'What's important to me? What do I care about? What have I benefitted from that I want to pay forward?' Then look for ways to spread help and hope.

I began using the #smallacts hashtag on Twitter shortly after the 2016 election as a way to resist. To resist the intolerance growing in our nation, to resist an upcoming administration that I believe threatens to pull us backward and strip rights from those already marginalized.

Of course, as a kid, I had no idea what was practical: I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an astronaut.

I don't think I know a single person who's a minority who hasn't experienced some form of discrimination at one time or another.

I was fortunate to have many teachers who encouraged me - one of the first was Dianne Derrick, my 5th grade teacher at Woodbury Elementary. She challenged us to write creatively and praised my work, but most importantly, she treated writing like it was important.

Gore isn't required for a good story, but adversity is.

Spend too much time alone with your own words, and your writing grows anemic, in dire need of a transfusion.

I don't think of myself as a mystery or thriller writer, honestly. I am in awe of mystery writers and don't think I have what it takes to write such a book.

Buying new books supports the writer by providing both a royalty and an audience; a writer whose book sells well has a better chance of selling another.

I wrote 'Little Fires Everywhere' and sold the book in 2015, still the Obama years. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not on my radar.

My parents came to America in the late 1960s because my father studied for a Ph.D. in Indiana. My mother joined him later. We had ancestors who came over at the turn of the century. One worked in a laundry, as is typical of Chinese-American immigrants.

If you see harassment happening, speak up. Being harassed is terrible; having bystanders pretend they don't notice is infinitely worse.

For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.

Comparing Asian writers mainly to other Asian writers implies that we're all telling the same story - a disappointingly reductive view.

What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.

There's a great joy in writing about a place you know very well, but there's also a lot of responsibility in trying to be accurate. It's a lot like writing about a relative: you can see both their strengths and their shortcomings, and even as you want to be honest, you want people to see the good that's there as well.

No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.