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

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

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."

But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph.

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

It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.