Love is a gift we deliver when we would rather not.

In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

If people believe that they are marrying out of love and free choice rather than out of duty, they are more likely to decide, if love should die, that the free choice to join together is no more significant than the free choice to part, and to look for love elsewhere; those married out of duty expect less love to begin with, and what duty has brought together, duty may keep together.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.