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.

I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true.

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other.

On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.

I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.