Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.