I've never let the criticism deter me.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.

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."

I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.