I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one's major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.

It's bliss when you give up all that stuff that separates you from other human beings. It's hard, but you break down all that stuff.