Let your face speak what's in your heart.

A lot of black people believe that Jews in this country have become white. They behave like white people rather than Jewish people.

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.

When a child walks in the room, your child or anybody else’s child, do your eyes light up? That’s what they’re looking for.

All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares.

You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.