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.

In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory?

Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred.

The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.

It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.