I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.