Love and hatred don't take turns; they exist side by side at the same time. And one's duty, one's obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.

The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.

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

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.

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.

I write out of defiance.