I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing.

When once I got to America I fell in love with hippie culture, and I've always wanted to live in the country and grow organic vegetables.

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

It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

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.

But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they enjoy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.