In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

Make a difference, does it? You stay the night here snake get you.

There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.