I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

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

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

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

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."

Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!