What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly people who can make laws and have the power to enforce them. I'm often amazed at the conversations black people have about themselves. They ought to be having these conversations about white people. It's white people who are flawed and at fault.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.