If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist.

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.