You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?

Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.

When you think of sexual liberation, which women wanted to have or not have children, which is the choice, not a command, and other kinds of things they wanted in their relationships with their husbands, or partners or what have you, became for subsequent generations some license that they themselves feel, that is absolutely demeaning and mean younger and younger and younger.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

Lonely was much better than alone.

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.