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.

The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."

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

I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.

I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?