Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

I quickly learned that motherhood was a high wire act sometimes performed without a net.

Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession ain't solution, however, because reading even at its most intense and verisimilitudinous is vicarious, and once you close the book you're off the hook.

It was important, I know, for my father as a product of his times not to be vulnerable, so he chose, and I can't say that I blame him, to live his life rather than create it.

I am a stranger to half measures.

The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.

Racism is a virus. And since nobody's really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.