It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

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.

An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.

Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.

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."

When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I'm finished.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.