I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something.

I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.

I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.

But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington go? Did George Washington go to college? This idea which we now have that people ought to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college?