"When writing, I often feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience in which I’m as ageless, sexless, classless, raceless as I can ever humanly get…I have to forget myself so I can be fully committed to understanding my character’s motivations in a way that isn’t facile or boxed in…"

“Change is effected by instruments of the state directly—and quickly—on the sociophysical body of the city itself. As the inhabitants of this body, these modifications rub off on us, whether we are aware of their effect on us or not, whether our class cushions us less or more…”

“Having grown up watching Hong Kong movies with gorgeous Chinese leads and casts, I didn’t feel starved of representation the way I might likely have felt if I had grown up Asian American in the US, or as a minority race in Singapore…”

“My responsibility, as an author, is to the novel I am writing, nothing more and nothing less. How that novel comes about to me is a mysterious thing that then becomes a rigorous process, and the balances that I do worry about keeping are narrative, aesthetic, or technical. I’m not willing or able to see myself as any one nationality or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or species when I write, I am just an amorphous storyteller whose personal biography is moot…”