I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.

There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.

Every time an old person dies, it's like a library burning down.

I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.

Every death is like the burning of a library.

Most of the things that are asked of me as a representative black person, would suggest never are we equal Americans.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.