I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.

Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in.

Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.