An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.

Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.

I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?

All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.