That's one of the beauties, I think, of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn't destroy everybody and it didn't destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it.

As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well.

When I'm writing, I'm thinking, "Well, this might be a book that I'll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with." But another part of me knows that when I'm past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it - probably more bad than good. I just know that. That's who I am.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

I want to give the evidence in a way that is convincing, but I don't want to cheat.

I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.