I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!

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.

The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

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

The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.