I've never let the criticism deter me.

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.

When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

I like to be depressing. I feel it's my duty to make everyone a little less happy. You know that line in the Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of happiness"? I've come to think that it has no meaning at all. You cannot pursue happiness. And to think that this bad little sentence has determined our lives.

I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.