...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.

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.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.

The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.