I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.

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

There are things that make us choose, on certain days, on certain nights, the opposite of love, in all its variations. But I want to acknowledge that with love and hate it's not simply one or the other. It's at least two, three, four, five different emotions existing at once, side by side, a broad spectrum of things alive.

The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but can never bring myself to do it.

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.