I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something.

It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.

I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!