When a man angers you, he conquers you.

You are your best thing

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does.

Nobody loved her and she wouldn’t have liked it if they had, she considered love a serious disability.

I know that my books are worthy, which is separate from me.