Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

I don't feel I'm angry. I feel as though I'm describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called "angry." If I had an affair with my husband's best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I'm not doing that.

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."

America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.