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

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.

It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed.

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 thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.

in the place I am from ... a grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth - carelessly, as if piled up in child's play, not serious at all - because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes the actions of the dead are more significant, more profound, than their actions in life, and no structure of concrete or stone can contain them.