Every experience shapes your writing, being stuck in a car on a lonely bridge, or dancing at a prom, being the it girl on the beach, all of those things influence your life, they influence how you write, and the topics you choose to write about.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, 'I'm a representative. '

I come as one, but stand as 10,000.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder-in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

I think I know that I deserve better. And so I try for better. I'm never so put off that I would ever walk out of a place not having tried the best I could.