Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

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.

I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.

I like to be depressing. I feel it's my duty to make everyone a little less happy. You know that line in the Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of happiness"? I've come to think that it has no meaning at all. You cannot pursue happiness. And to think that this bad little sentence has determined our lives.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

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.