I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

Whatever happens, we can deal with it if we admit that it's happening and so on. So to be comfortable with what is - that is a real superpower.

I think the path for a young writer might be one that says, "I have to accept myself, this is what I am. I can't eradicate my defects. I can work on them."

...smile first, then speak.

It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn't that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that's actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything.

Even the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.

I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.