In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.

No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories.

If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content.

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

I think America has always been polarized... It's a racist country and it has always been.