I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.

Volumptuous women look good. Ignorant messages from mass media tell women what size to be, but female qualities-a softness, a soothing capacity that a woman has no matter what size she happens to be-sustain the more humane aspects of civilization.

Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.

Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately.

People don't really think other people are the same.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.