You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it.

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

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