I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.

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.

Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

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

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."