I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.

I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

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.