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

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.

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.

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

Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.