If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you.

Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.