I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

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

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.

What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly people who can make laws and have the power to enforce them. I'm often amazed at the conversations black people have about themselves. They ought to be having these conversations about white people. It's white people who are flawed and at fault.

The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.

A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black."

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