Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.

I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.

He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical."

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

I write out of defiance.