Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild...It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.

What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

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.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

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