The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

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

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

Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.

One day I was living silently in a personal hell, without anyone to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to have; and then one day I was not living like that at all. I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in.

You know how they say a man's house is his castle? I think for a woman, it's her body. I feel so strongly about a woman's right to choose. This is my Zionism. It's not a "right" any more than it's a right to breathe, to take in oxygen.

It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I'm wearing someone is probably dying for.