For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. This is the life I have. This is the life I write about.

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

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.

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

I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.

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 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.