How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

If we had no language we'd have nothing.

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever and it is like forever.

Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.