Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.

I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.