The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but can never bring myself to do it.

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

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.

I write out of defiance.

I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.

I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?