I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

It's funny: over time, if you're fortunate, you build a nice career, and you have these interesting moments, and I would not, looking back, trade any of them - 'Red Tails,' '12 Years a Slave' and 'Undercover Brother.'

I don't have a career, I have a life. I don't have an exterior judgment on what would be good or bad for me.

Whatever you got you have to accentuate. I ran my female card up and down the ladder my whole career, because I was in a man's world. It was worked by women but owned by men. I was the only female owner in my field at that time.

I've come to a point in my career where it doesn't matter if I dribble or nutmeg someone. The only thing that matters is whether I was decisive, did I put the ball in the back of the net today, and did it help the team win.