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.

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

It was a fine cry - loud and long - but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.