I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.

People from Europe and people from Africa encountered one another long before the invention of "Europe" and "Africa" and "white people" and "black people."

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. People looked for alternative ways to express themselves personally and politically, people doubted the system, and there was the terrible kind of division in black America between a radical leadership and a much older, compromising leadership.

When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someone about something that they may know nothing about. They depend on you to read or interpret as best as you can.